Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged Read online

  The word “husband” threw me, despite the fact that somewhere in my head I knew Barrett didn’t have a husband. I’d always made it a point never to get involved with a woman whose betrayed lover had chest hair.

  When she began to moan and climax, I was unable to escape, and her verbalization of extreme pleasure was reaching Beverly Sills proportions. I clamped my hand over her mouth, thinking our position reminded me of a takedown on the police force rather than an act of consensual sex. How can sex be so one-sided and so unsexy?

  Suddenly she ratcheted up her hip movements to Tilt-A-Whirl force, groaning loudly, then exploded and went limp, unconscious. Silence—stillness. Scared, I spoke her name, took her pulse, shook her—nothing. My heart raced. Omigod, has she had a heart attack having sex virtually with herself and died on me like some old guy in a sleazebag hotel?

  I took her pulse again, and it was weak and fluttering. I banged on the wall block and started CPR. The Japanese woman stepped inside the door, startled when I looked up frantic.

  “Get an ambulance!” And I resumed trying to breathe life back into her. Images of that day at Orso’s flashed through my mind when Barrett was having lunch with me and I had to call an ambulance. Note to self. No more dining with Barrett, assuming she’ll ever be able to dine with anyone again.

  Moments later the paramedics arrived, and after much talking into their radios and taking vital signs and quizzing me, they finally gave her a shot of Benadryl and loaded her onto a stretcher.

  When the sushi fell out of Barrett’s pant leg, the female tech glanced my way and began quizzing me anew. “What was she doing right before it happened?”

  “She was drinking and very animated.” Only a partial lie or partial truth, whichever way you chose to look at it. I wasn’t about to say that Barrett Silvers had humped me like a horned toad and then stopped breathing.

  The shot of Benadryl seemingly having done its trick, Barrett was already coming around on the stretcher and demanding to be let off, refusing IVs and further assistance. The young male paramedic allowed her to get up, saying something in the food or wine could have caused the reaction.

  Barrett asked me for a pen and, her grip still weak, managed to write a wobbly signature that dismissed the paramedics. Then she signed a waiver for the restaurant that assured any lawyers who cared that whatever had happened wasn’t their fault. For a studio executive, she gave up her rights pretty quickly, I thought, but I wouldn’t want my body taken to an L.A. hospital either, unless my parts were so badly damaged they were arriving under separate transport in an ice chest.

  The sexy dining alcove now looked like an episode of ER with torn paper, tape, tubing, and other paraphernalia mingled among the lotus blossoms and orange slices.

  The medics attempted a quick cleanup and loaded up to leave. I was relieved when the room was cleared and Barrett asked me to drive her home, having come by cab. She put her arm over my shoulder, the full weight of her tall frame heavy and unsexy. The weight of a woman hanging on me, drunkenly rather than affectionately, felt different—both physically and psychologically.

  A nervous Japanese restaurant manager who wanted to be on record, I was certain, as having been of assistance, followed us to my car.

  Helping Barrett inside, I felt sorry for her, but I also had the same reaction I surmised men had—awaking in bed with someone who looked sexy after six martinis, but now not so good over a couple of eggs. Barrett’s pleated and pressed black slacks were wrinkled, her patent loafers had a gouge in one toe, which must have occurred as they hurried to load her on the stretcher, and she looked worn smooth, her loose silk shirt with the French cuffs sadly stained.

  I drove slowly, not wanting to jar her, and when I asked occasionally if she was alright, she nodded. As we pulled up in front of her Las Feliz home, she reached over and took my hand in her slightly larger one, the gold pinkie ring somehow exotically sexy on her long slender fingers.

  “I enjoyed the first half of the evening,” she said, but her words sounded like a perfunctory wrap-up to a date that hadn’t ended well. “I’ll call you and see how you’re doing. Think about the notes from Jacowitz, will you?”

  How in hell can she still be talking business, I wondered as she opened the car door, and then I realized business was all she had. I started to get out and help her but she waved me off, some shred of pride left.

  As I watched her walk up the steps, I was sad. Who in the world will Barrett Silvers ever meet who understands her? Where will she ever find love? There’s no one on the planet who can handle her or make her want to be faithful, yet deep down that’s probably what she wants.

  Early in my life I might have taken on that task simply to save her, despite having to sacrifice myself in the process, but I’d gotten my money’s worth with a shrink on that topic, so the most I could give Barrett tonight was a ride home.

  Quickly my own love life clicked in, and I wondered if this whole bizarre evening constituted being unfaithful to Callie Rivers. I had tried not to let Barrett have sex on top of me, if that was the proper phrase. I hadn’t enjoyed it and was embarrassed by it. Nonetheless, Barrett Silvers had climaxed against my body. What should I tell Callie, and was telling even required?

  Callie Rivers was psychic, so wouldn’t it be entirely up to her to figure it out, get a call from the cosmos, a visual from Venus, or whatever? Did I have to walk into the cabin and blurt, “Hey, honey, by the way, while I was having a business dinner with Barrett Silvers she put sushi in her slits and humped me like a hound, but it was one-sided”? What earthly good could come from sharing that piece of information? It was bizarre, unexpected, and over.

  But the big question still remained: when is telling required? After all, even Catholics go to confession voluntarily.

  Chapter Two

  An hour later, after brewing coffee so strong I had to almost chisel it out of the pot, I drank two cups before loading Elmo, luggage, and laptop into the Jeep and heading out under a full moon for Sedona to get as far away as possible from L.A and Barrett Silvers. Leaving now would put me in Sedona Sunday at dawn, a day early, and give me time to settle in before Callie arrived the following morning.

  Within minutes, we were heading down Riverside Drive in the dark, hooking up with Highway 15, then connecting to I-40 in Barstow and breathing room, as I finally escaped the ubiquitous Valley traffic. Elmo swayed and paced across the flattened backseat of the Jeep, having trouble keeping his footing as I swerved in and out of the chain of headlights.

  "I was attacked," I told my faithful hound and he let out a mournful moan. "Barrett lies in wait for me every time, like a damned vulture. I shouldn't have gone. But how do you not go when she's the studio exec on your movie and wants to meet? I didn't do anything.. .she did it."

  Elmo cocked his head to look at me.

  "What?" I asked defensively. "Look, here's the truth. I don't live with Callie yet—but of course I want to. So that raises the question, when am I considered married?" I broke out in a sweat and began ripping my sweater jacket off as fast as I could while driving eighty miles an hour down the freeway holding the steering wheel with my knees. Lately I'd begun having hot flashes when there was nothing worth flashing about.

  Elmo flopped down on the console between the bucket seats, apparently knowing from my tone that this was going to be a long night.

  "Straight people have a wedding date after which they're never to look at anyone else, much less fuck anyone else. Forget that the groom might have a bachelor party the night before and screw three hookers and a beauty queen. That's still okay until twelve hours later when he walks down the aisle and is never supposed to do it again—never even think of hookers again, or talk about hookers, or beauty queens, or anyone else but his wife. Now does that make sense to you? What was different in those twelve hours that made him not guilty and then guilty?"

  Elmo's sigh sounded somewhere between bored and exasperated.

  "Hold on, I'm getting to the point." I rea
ched into the glove box and handed him a cookie to make him a more attentive listener. He chomped down on it, in a slow, thoughtful crunching as if letting me know he was hearing me out, which I appreciated.

  "What's different? I'll tell you what's different: the walk down the aisle. An aisle, a long corridor of carpet, suddenly alters right and wrong—get it, alters? It interjects morality into what was formerly just sex. The walk down the aisle announces to the world that you have decided to be monogamous forever.

  "Where's my aisle? Where is the point at which I'm supposed to be completely hers? I need a marker. Is it after I told her I loved her? Is it after we had that first fabulous night in bed? Is it after we move in together?

  "Lesbians have no aisle. The aisle is a finish line. You cross it and you're finished. Straights know that."

  Hearing a muffled gurgle, I glanced down to find Elmo snoring.

  "I listen to you day and night, thanks to Callie's coaching, and I'm getting moist snores."

  Grabbing a Kleenex I daubed at his large black nose and then patted his tricolored fur suit. Elmo never even twitched. I turned on the radio to hear a deep-voiced country singer croon that he would be happy to walk through hell on Sunday to ensure that his lover remained in the garden literally fertilizing the flowers— demonstrating what monogamy can come to if both parties don't buy into it. Patting the white milk bone on Elmo's caramel-colored head, I continued what I suspected was a dogalogue—one-sided dialogue with a dog no longer listening.

  "Dogs don't have to worry about the deleterious effects of random sex, unless it's getting hung up during the deed and having some stranger turn a hose on you." Elmo roused and looked up with worried eyes, perhaps seeing images of himself in a compromising position. "Don't panic, it rarely happens. Stick with girls your own size and you'll be fine," I assured him.

  Driving from the Valley to Sedona at nirvana-speed—a velocity that exceeded the ridiculously low limit inflicted by governmental bodies but not fast enough to induce a donut-dunking HP officer to fire up his red light and come after me—I was momentarily content.

  Callie Rivers's sweet soul and sexy body were finally on my horizon. She had ducked and dodged and given me every excuse for our remaining long-distance lovers, but now I felt certain I had her on the brink of living with me. We'd been together in Tulsa, L.A., and Las Vegas, talking, laughing, and making love in enough places and circumstances for the test drive to be over—the test drive Mother had always warned against when I was growing up.

  "Sleeping with a man before you're married comes to no good end. Why buy the cow when the milk's so cheap?" Mother told me from the time I could walk, oblivious to the troubling analogy of daughter as cow. Looking back I realized the advice was sound and effective. I never slept with men—thus keeping myself on the market and the value of my mammaries high.

  We stopped only once for gas and a bladder break at a time-worn service station whose faded sign obfuscated the name and whose gas-pump handle had endured more hand grabs than a rock star's crotch. I bought a Hershey's Almond Bar, and Elmo nudged me when we got back in the car, wanting a bite.

  "You know Callie believes chocolate can kill a dog," I said as Elmo swung his head suddenly and bit off a third of the candy bar. His eyes glistened in basset ecstasy.

  "Damn! You know I hate to eat after you because of where your tongue's been."

  Elmo kept his head down but cut his eyes up at me.

  "True, but I brush my teeth," I said in response, and bit into the candy bar, knowing Callie would pass out before she would ever eat after a dog.

  "Don't do this in front of her, or neither of our mouths will experience pleasure again."

  I knew the scenery from L.A. to Sedona by heart and played it in my head like a virtual tour because it was too dark to see anything. When we began to climb slowly up the mountain to Flagstaff, shadows of the topography announced the world had changed. Despite the darkness, I could almost feel the mountains ahead.

  The turn south on I-17 began a winding trip down into the canyon an hour before sunrise. No light glanced off the red rocks, and only shadows fell on the forest trees. Nonetheless, I was lighthearted and hopeful.

  I would write a powerful screenplay and make love with Callie Rivers in an erotic frenzy that would grow exponentially by the day. And after the screenplay was written, I would take her home with me and we would live together forever. I would be so happy that the mere thought of another woman would simply be blown out of my head right through my ears.

  I conjured up euphoric visions of our new domesticity, our concupiscent coupledom, and our mutual joy pegging off the bliss meter. I envisioned our dropping dry cleaning off.. .together, grocery shopping.. .together, going to vet visits and dentists' appointments... together. I intended never to let her out of my sight.

  "That solves monogamy right there," I said to Elmo, who was snoring.

  We drove farther down into the woods, the road hugging a crystal-clear body of water until we came to a horseshoe curve, then a steeper descent down to a creek and a series of cabins indiscernible from the road. Gliding slowly off the highway onto the soft dirt and then crunchy rocks, I rolled to a stop in front of a cabin, reached into my jeans' pocket, and pulled out a key with a tiny white tag dangling from it that said Cabin 11.

  A small, rustic, red log cabin, buried back off the main road, peeked out of the tall pines. I put the parking brake on, grabbed a small flashlight out of the glove box, and told Elmo to hang tight while I figured out if this was the right place. Serene and beautiful, it was also a bit spooky in the predawn. Callie had rented the place from someone she knew and mailed me the key and directions.

  Shining the light on the plaque by the door I read ELEVEN. This was definitely the place. I put the key in the lock, opened it with a ten-degree turn, and heard it click, making me wonder why whoever owned the place had even bothered, since I could have jimmied the feeble mechanism with a credit card. But this was Sedona, hardly the crime capital of the world.

  No light switch inside the door, so I eased across the room looking for a floor lamp and bumped into furniture along the way.

  That's when I heard a swish ahead of me, like weather stripping at the bottom of a door scraping the floor, and a shadow played across the door frame. I dropped to a crouch to make myself a smaller target. Who is it? Maybe the back door was unlocked and a transient is sleeping here.

  Elmo barked loudly from inside the car, apparently trying to warn me of someone at my back. I spun on the balls of my feet, still crouched and facing a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. Seeing no one, I completed the circle until I was facing the back porch again where I froze, my heart poised to leap out of my chest. Someone’s in the room with me.

  Whoever it was had entered through the back door and was nearly on top of me. Stabbing my hand into my jacket pocket, I grabbed my gun and yanked it out, bounced to a standing position, and pointed it in the direction of the back door.

  "Don't move or you're fucked! Turn on the lights!" I shouted to the intruder, who obviously knew the room layout, where I didn't.

  "Fucked?" A soft chuckle. "I'll take you up on that—and forget the lights."

  I recognized Callie's sultry voice. "What are you doing here? You're not due until tomorrow," I said, delighted to be near her under any circumstance, and laid my gun down on the nearest flat surface.

  "I was on the back porch having a drink and waiting for dawn, and something told me my lover was coming."

  "You scared the hell out of me."

  "I have since the day I met you." She slid into my arms in the dark and covered my face with kisses.

  "I could have shot—"

  Her mouth muffled my words as she renewed her kisses and reached under my shirt to unhook my bra. Her hands were down the back of my pants pulling me to her, strong and sure of what she wanted, her mouth searching mine as if she'd lost her life there and was determined to find it.

  As we kissed, s
he walked me backward through a doorway and pushed me onto a narrow double bed with squeaking coil springs buried deep inside the old mattress that had obviously seen plenty of action over the years and still had the strength to bounce us when we flopped onto it, making us laugh like kids.

  "Wow, this'll be like making love on a trampoline."

  "Hang on and don't lose your place," she said and put her hot mouth on my breast. Her fingers searched for me and I tried to adjust to how quickly I'd gone from highway to heaven. "Have you missed me?" she asked as I pushed my body into her, so insane I couldn't remember my own name.

  "Incredibly," I managed to whisper.

  "Good, because you belong to me, and I want you to remember that. I just got out of the shower. Why don't you hop in and I'll be waiting for you right here." A seductive tone belied her functional intent that anything she put in her mouth would definitely be washed first—be it fruit or friend.

  I broke free, dashed into the bathroom promising to be back in sixty seconds, stripped by the dim glow of the bathroom night-light, jumped into the two-by-two tin box, and cranked the rusty metal shower nozzle that squealed on my behalf as the ice-cold spray temporarily shocked all thoughts of sex right out of my brain. I immediately understood why Eskimos, obviously too cold to disrobe, only rubbed noses and undoubtedly adopted children from Brazil.

  After jumping out and toweling off, I dove damp and naked into bed beside Callie.

  "You smell great." Her warm arms around me, she picked up where she'd left off. I marveled at how good I felt every time she touched me and wondered if our lovemaking would always remain as intense and incredible as it was right now.

  Suddenly my mind jumped its track and fixated on the idea that this would be the last woman I would ever touch like this—not that I wanted to touch another woman, not that Callie Rivers wasn't the most phenomenal lover on the planet, it was simply that this was... it, that moment when I'd gotten what I was looking for. I'd come to earth to find love and here it was and now it was done. The thought of my perpetual quest for love being done, over, finished made me break out in a sweat.