Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Flora Lee stood up and turned off the water, then took a couple more pulls on the vodka bottle. She stepped into the tub and began to wash her body roughly with a washcloth. She was out of the bath and onto the bottle of vodka again when she heard the policeman call to her. He still held the phone to his ear.

  Flora Lee opened the door to the bathroom and cautiously came back into the living room, her robe pulled tight around her. She was feeling a little better, but she still knew she had a problem. Still, he was such a nice man. He seemed to be on hold, only listening. “Would you like a drink, officer?” she asked quietly.

  “Mrs. Deluce, I’m on duty. Just sit down.”

  She took a seat at the edge of the sofa.

  “I just got finished talking to your daughter. You’re who you say you are, all right. Now, let me tell you, I don’t like this situation any better than you, but for Sharleen Smith I’d do anything. The Department and the studios don’t like this kind of thing, either. Bad for everyone. The guy was just a drifter. No one will miss him. And I’m too close to retirement to have this ruin me now.”

  Flora Lee felt some of the tension leave her body, but she still remained perched on the edge of her seat. Had God listened to her prayer? “What is she going to do for me?”

  “You’re going to get dressed, pack a suitcase, get a cab to the airport, and be on the first flight to New Orleans this morning. In New Orleans, you’re going to call this man,” he handed her a piece of paper with a name and a phone number. “He’ll set you up with a place to stay. Miss Smith was shocked, but she was kind enough to say that she would continue your allowance, but only through this man. He’ll see you get a check each month.”

  Flora Lee started to cry. “I knew it. I just knew my baby girl would help me. And thank you, sir.” The sobs started to rack her body again.

  “Hold up, lady. There’s more. If I let you go tonight, you’re never to contact Sharleen or Dean again. You’re never to mention your relationship with them, tell anyone you know about them. Nothing. This means you’ll never see your kids again. But that’s the only way I’m going to let you out of this without at least a life jail sentence, and a short life it might be.”

  Flora Lee didn’t take a moment. “Sharleen said she’d keep sending the money?”

  The cop nodded his head. “Yeah, but you gotta watch that mouth of yours. You tell anyone, and the FBI gets involved. Then you’re in the chair for sure.”

  “Well, she got nothing to worry about from me. I’d never hurt either one of them. It ain’t like I raised them or nothing.” Flora Lee nodded her head. “I’ll go to New Orleans, and you kin tell her, starting tomorrow, I’ll never drink again. I just promised the Lord that in the bathtub.” She dabbed at her eyes with the edge of her robe, then stood up.

  “I have to pack my bag…in there.” She pointed to the bedroom where the murdered man still lay.

  “Make it fast. I got some more work to do tonight before this whole mess is over. And two other cops are coming. I want you outa here before they get here.”

  She didn’t have to be told twice to rush. Flora Lee grabbed a couple of pants suits, some underwear, and as much of her makeup as she could squeeze into the brand-new suitcase Sharleen had given her. She was dressed and back in the living room in less than five minutes, and hadn’t once looked at Dobe in the bed.

  The cop had money in his open hand, which he was thrusting toward Flora Lee. “This will be enough to get you to New Orleans. You’ll get more when you arrive and call the number I gave you.” Flora Lee reached for the money with one hand, grasping the handle of the suitcase with the other. “There’s just one more thing you got to do before you go.”

  Flora Lee looked up at him with renewed alarm. Was he going to make her sign a confession or something? “You got to write this note in your own handwriting before you leave.” He handed her a piece of paper.

  “Dear Sharleen and Dean,” she copied. “In case I don’t never see you again, thanks for everything. I feel like a burden to you, nothing I aimed to be. I won’t be coming back, so don’t expect me.” She signed it, “Love, Momma.”

  Flora Lee jumped up as she heard a horn blast. “That’s your taxi. I called it for you. Here’s your money.”

  Flora Lee grabbed it and stuffed it into her pocket-book. “I’m told they’re bringing back death by hanging. It’s a terrible way to die, Mrs. Deluce. Understand?”

  Flora Lee nodded her head, grabbed her suitcase and the bottle of vodka and ran out the door.

  The cop stood at the window and watched her scuttle away. He sat down and dialed the phone. While he was on the phone, the door to the bedroom opened slowly, and Dobe came through it, the blade of the knife still protruding from his chest. The cop turned to look at him and smiled.

  “Goddamn it, Barney, it took you long enough. I’ve had to take a piss for the last hour,” Dobe said, as he opened his shirt and removed the trick half-knife.

  “You did an excellent job—for an amateur,” Barney said with a nod of approval.

  Dobe moved into the bathroom now, where he made sounds of relief. When he came back out to the living room, he slumped into a chair, and Barney handed him a double vodka from another bottle he’d found in the kitchen. “Well, Barney, that was probably the easiest thousand dollars you ever earned in all your years in acting.” Dobe smiled. “Thanks for making the riff work.”

  “No problem. How’d you like it when I told her hanging was coming back?”

  “Ad-libs were never your strongest suit, Barney. Now, give me all them notes on the birth certificates, and let’s get out of here.”

  41

  “Darling, wonderful lunch, but I simply have got to run,” Crystal Plenum told Sy Ortis as she slid out of the booth, then bent to kiss him on both cheeks. “Being on time is my Hercules’ heel.”

  “Achilles’ heel, Crystal.”

  “Whatever!”

  Her two camp followers, Crystal’s constant companions—her “people,” for chrissakes—hovered before and behind her, as they made tracks to the exit. Sy watched as Crystal stopped occasionally, air-kissed somebody while her “people” stood waiting, then, finally, made it to the door.

  Sy let out a sigh of relief as the door shut behind Crystal. There were two kinds of lunches: the hard and the soft. Sy found the soft ones more difficult. This lunch, a soft, had no purpose—no immediate purpose, that is—except to keep Crystal warm, tell her how beautiful and talented she still was, and what great properties he was looking over for her. All lies, as it happened. A sort of aborted jerkoff: a lot of stroking but no climax. Ass-kissing, it would be called in any other line of business. The part Sy hated most about the way he made money. These stroking parties left him feeling more like the puppet than the puppeteer.

  Crystal was sinking, and both she and Sy knew it. Since Jack and Jill, there had not been a decent lead offered her. Of course, there were never many leading parts for women approaching thirty-five, but she’d been big box office up till Jack and Jill. That film had changed the public’s perception of her. Now she couldn’t play young anymore.

  Sy sipped the last of his coffee, and didn’t have to beckon to a waiter for a refill. It appeared before him, before even he knew he wanted a second cup. But, then, this is the Polo Lounge, and I am known here, he thought. If I can’t get it here, where would I get it?

  He was startled for a moment by the presence of a small, impeccably dressed man, standing at his table. It took him a minute. “Ara Sagarian,” Sy finally said, and just looked at him. Ara was obviously on his way to his own table. “Mind if I join you?” Ara asked. The waiter hovered, waiting for Sy’s decision.

  “Well, I’m on my way out. Just had lunch with Crystal. My last espresso,” he added.

  Ara sat down opposite Sy, not accepting the brush-off, and the waiter hurried to set his place. Sy grimaced, not giving a shit whether Ara noticed or not. Sy could see that Ara obviously had something on his mind, but at Ara’s age, an
d with a stroke, it would probably take a little time for him to get it out. Sy wasn’t in a very patient mood.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Ara said, coming surprisingly quickly to the point, “but I wanted you to hear it from me.” Sy watched Ara meticulously wipe the corner of his mouth. “I’ve signed Michael McLain. I didn’t solicit him, I want you to know. He came to me.”

  So that was it. The old Armenian maricón wanted to lord it over him. Sy leaned over toward Ara. “You know who I got in my stable. And, the way I see it, three queens beat a pair. Michael McLain for Lila Kyle isn’t exactly the trade of the century. I wouldn’t brag about it if I were you.”

  “I’m not telling you to brag. I’m simply extending you the courtesy of hearing it from me.”

  “I think you confuse me with someone who gives a shit,” Sy snapped. He stared into Ara’s rheumy eyes.

  “Let me tell you something, son,” Ara began. “In this town, in this Industry, it’s best to be nice to everyone. On your way up especially, because you might need them to be nice to you on the way down.”

  Sy watched Ara as he ministered to the drool on his mouth, then picked up a fork to begin to eat his salad. Sy’s lunch was now grinding away at his intestines. How dare this old maricón give him advice! All the bile from his lunch with Crystal, from all the ass-kissing he’d had to do, rose into his throat. “You fucking old has-been. Who the fuck are you?”

  Sy saw Ara blink. Then the old man struggled visibly for control. “Let me tell you a story, Sy.”

  Sy held up one hand to hold off Ara for a moment, beckoning for a waiter at the same time with his other. The waiter was at the table in a second. “Do something for me,” Sy said to the waiter. “Listen to this pathetic old guy’s story, will you? I have something more important to do.”

  Sy stood up, walked passed the maître d’s desk, stopped to sign his tab, then went through the open door out to the parking valet.

  With all his aggravation that afternoon, it was just as well that he didn’t see Neil Morelli lurking near the entrance to the car park, his hand in his jacket pocket, holding an ominous bulge.

  42

  Marty DiGennaro, famous director, conqueror of the film world, recipient of four Oscars, winner of a contest of wills with Bob LeVine, television’s new prince, the most powerful creative man in Hollywood, lay tied to the four corners of his bed, spread out as flat as a roadmap and naked as a newt. He strained at the silken tasseled cords that wrapped around the mahogany bedposts and doubled back over his wrists. The knots were neat half-hitches, he noticed and, absurdly, he wondered if Lila had been in the Girl Scouts. Back in Queens, he’d made it all the way to Eagle Scout. Classic nerd. He still knew how to tie clove hitches, square knots, and sheepshanks. In the dark, he pulled against the taut restraints and grinned. As an Eagle Scout back in New York, even in his wildest masturbatory fantasies, he’d never imagined this.

  The first time Lila had tied him up, roping him to the bed, he’d been shocked, but not because he was a prude. It was just that she was so, so, well, reluctant to have sex at all that he assumed her to be, if not the virgin she claimed, then at least inexperienced. Or perhaps damaged in some way.

  So, when she raised a perfectly arched eyebrow and slowly began to pull the silk rope out of an Hermès bag, he had been nonplussed. And, to be honest, turned off by the idea. He had, of course, done a little role-playing—his ex-wife had liked spankings from time to time—and he’d had more than any man’s fair share of kinky starlets who demanded everything from golden showers to letting their dogs participate.

  But being tied up himself, being vulnerable, immobilized, pinned to the bed, didn’t seem desirable. Still, for Lila to suggest anything, to allow anything, was such a surprise that he had agreed. Without a smile or a giggle, with utmost concentration, she had wrapped his wrists and ankles in businesslike knots. Then she’d lowered the lights and left him alone, tied down.

  The strangest thing to Marty was that that was when his erection began. There, powerless and naked in the dark, he felt the anticipatory tingling, the excitement that he hadn’t felt since the old days at the Flushing Loew’s movie house. He smiled at the unlikely association. So much in life—well at least in his life—had been more exciting in the anticipation than the acquisition. The movies he ran in his head were almost invariably better than the ones he made. He sighed. He supposed that was what made him so successful as a director.

  But, once tied to the bed, he was the director of nothing. Lila had re-emerged, her long hair loose and bright as a flame, even in the dimness. She wore a kind of corset or something—Marty didn’t know exactly what to call it—a bronze-colored bustier without cups. Her breasts, so full, so perfect, rode over the top of the thing, her waist even more compressed by the lacing. And she wore a matching lace G-string, a sort of high-cut triangle in the front, but when she turned around, all there was in the back was a silken cord that slid up between her perfect ass cheeks to hook on the bottom of the corset. Marty tried to take a breath, but it was hard; his chest hurt him so. Aside from a few blow jobs, he hadn’t had sex with her, and he’d never seen her naked. Her incredible long legs, her perfect ass, her tits, so swollen, so round, so perfect, all moved him. His penis strained toward her, but it was the only appendage he could move.

  “Pretty?” Lila asked.

  “Beautiful,” he gasped.

  “Want to touch?”

  “Yes.” His hands pulled against the rope. “Untie me,” he said.

  “Oh, no. Where’s the fun in that?” she asked, her voice husky. She sashayed over to him and bent from the waist until her right breast, her perfect right breast, just barely brushed his outstretched left hand. He tried to close his fingers around her softness, but with a smile she pulled away. “Oh, no,” she said again. Her voice was a throaty whisper. “First you have to kiss it.”

  He smiled back at her. “My pleasure,” he whispered. “Untie me. Please.”

  “Oh, no,” she demurred. Instead, she moved to the foot of the bed. Then, in a single graceful movement, she stood on the bed, over him, a foot planted on either side of his waist. He could feel her slim ankles against his hips. Looking up, he saw her breasts over him, her cool, perfect face, her hair hanging down like a velvety curtain. She straddled him, careful not to touch his swollen penis, and sat on his chest.

  “Kiss it,” she told him, and slowly, ever so slowly, she lowered her breast toward him. Hungrily he strained his head up toward her, but the ropes held him firmly, and she stopped just short of his mouth.

  “Say ‘please,’” she told him.

  “Please,” he begged.

  “Please what?” she asked.

  “Please…please, may I kiss your breast?” His voice was a croak. His testicles felt as tight and as hard as summer plums in their skin. He groaned.

  Lila smiled. She bent lower, her tiny coppery nipple suspended a half-inch above his pursed and open mouth. “Here,” she said, and let the nipple just brush against his lips. It was hot as a flame against his dry tongue. He groaned again, her weight heavy on his chest. “More,” he pleaded.

  Then Lila slid off the bed and stood beside it. She lit a candle and in the flickering glow she stood, displaying her perfection. She was, he thought, the most exquisite woman ever created. Her flawless skin gleamed. Her hair, so thick, so glossy, so long, was like the tail of the most perfect thoroughbred. Her teeth, her eyes, her lips reflected back the light. Tears filled his eyes.

  “Want to touch me?” she asked.

  Marty could only nod.

  Lila cupped both her long, slim hands under her full breasts. He could see the shapely nails of her perfect manicure sink into the milky flesh near her nipple. “Want to touch me here?” she asked, a little breathless. He nodded again. She smiled, and slowly, ever so slowly, squeezed her breasts harder, lifting them up like offerings. Then, with thumb and forefingers, she pinched each nipple, first the left, then the right. She closed her eyes
. “Oooh,” she moaned. “It feels so good. Do you want to do this?”

  Marty couldn’t even nod.

  Lila ran her hands along her waist, down her thighs, up over her belly, touching, stroking, pinching her own flesh, while Marty lay there, powerless to do anything but watch, his penis engorged and throbbing, throbbing in a way he had never felt before. She turned her back toward him, and he felt a pang at losing sight of her wonderful tits, but Lila again began to run her own hands over her back and then down to her rounded, perfect ass, her fingers kneading her own flesh until he almost cried out that she must be bruising herself.

  She turned to him. “Do you want me to touch you?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes. Please,” he said. She smiled, and slowly moved her lovely long hands toward him. Lightly as a butterfly, barely touching, she ran her fingers over his bony chest, then down to his flat belly. His penis twitched up at her. He could see a bead of clear liquid at its head. “Yes,” he moaned, but her hands moved up, away, up to his chest, to his own nipples, then over his face, his eyes, across his mouth. He kissed her fingers then, and they stopped for a moment in their movement to explore his burning lips, his mouth, his tongue. Slowly, Lila inserted a finger into his mouth, and hungrily, eagerly, he sucked at it. Then another finger, and another, until his mouth was stuffed full of her hand. Gratefully, he held her in his mouth with his lips, his tongue, even his teeth. He held a part of her, but too soon, too soon, she withdrew and moved her hand again across his hairless chest, over to a nipple, which she idly tweaked with a fingernail, then drew her nails down, down, but once again past his loins, past his aching joint, not touching his straining testicles, down his thighs, raking his calves, not stopping until she was at the foot of the bed, holding his feet. Gently but firmly, she cupped his feet in her hands and then carefully, deliberately, she began to rub her breasts against them.