The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  I guess I had a little smarts. I did not move Filly to New York to take Melissa’s place. I set her up in an apartment on the Jersey side of the Walt Whitman Bridge, and I made reasons to go down there often. In fact, when I was on my way to Washington or Baltimore I would pick her up and take her with me. I’d have the pilot land, take Filly on board, and we’d take off again.

  When Len married Sue Ellen, Melissa sat in the church beside me, as if she was my wife. She went to the receptions and parties with me, as if she was my wife. Modestly and appropriately dressed for the occasion, she made a favorable impression even on the partners from Hale & Dorr. I know it surprised Sue Ellen’s father to see how the woman with me was not a model from a Cheeks store—though I wish he could have known!—but a well spoken, dignified woman. I might have wished it were Giselle there beside me, but I could be proud of Melissa, and I was.

  Even so … Filly was waiting in a motel room near the airport, and the day after the wedding and reception I sent Melissa back to New York on the Metroliner and flew Filly to Martha’s Vineyard. So much for respectability.

  There was on the Vineyard—and still is, for all I know—what was called a “free beach,” meaning clothing optional. I had a camera with me, and I took the best photograph I’ve ever taken in my life. It was of Filly standing at the edge of the water on a foggy morning when there was no surf. The water is visible behind her but quickly vanishes in the fog so the background is grayish white, even though it is a color photograph. She was wearing only a pair of cutoff blue jeans that hung across her hips and left her navel exposed. Her bare breasts rested on her arms that were folded over her stomach. She had raised her chin and was staring with half a frown at something out of sight to the camera—maybe another photographer behind me.

  I had a magnificent color print made from that slide and had it framed. It hangs in my apartment to this day.

  I took Filly with me when I went out to Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Giselle and I had had a heavy curtain installed behind the front seats of the Beech so we could have some privacy back in the passenger seats. In a Lear jet you don’t need that curtain; the passenger compartment is separated from the cockpit by a wall. Anyone who has ever flown in a bizjet, though, knows you can’t really screw, not comfortably—unless you reconfigure the passenger space for the purpose. In fact, we did it on the floor. That was some great sex, too, on that hard floor. The plane was almost always moving, up and down, side to side, or both—which added to the fun.

  Well, there’s something else a girl can do for a guy. Giselle did. It’s said that Frenchwomen have an instinct for giving head. I don’t know if Giselle had an instinct or not. I only know it was entirely natural to her, something she expected to do and did without hesitation. Melissa did it, too, though for her it was a concession. She didn’t like it, especially not on her knees, which she thought was demeaning, though that was by far the best way to do it in an airplane. Filly…? I don’t think she could have faked the enthusiasm she brought to sucking cock. She loved it! She’d lick my balls for ten minutes before she ever moved her tongue up my shaft—until I was ready to beg her. Then she licked my shaft, all of it, especially the tip. Suck? It was only when she sensed that I was about to come that she took me inside her mouth and licked and sucked and swallowed.

  In Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other places I introduced her as my chief model, and she did model the Cheeks product line, especially to politicians who wondered if they should oppose the introduction of this kind of store into their cities.

  Introducing the product line to a meeting of politicians and “community leaders” had become a routine. We held shows in hotel suites, all very much alike. Before Filly I had hired a local model or two. Now I used her and hired just one. They modeled a few of our more conservative lines—nightgowns and teddies, bra-and-panty sets. No crotchless panties, no strip panels, no nipple clips.

  Then we ran a film or videotape showing our stores—showing how they were elegant and dignified. We showed our windows, with nothing on display but our signature cast-metal signs. We showed our counters and displays.

  We presented each guest a small gift package.

  The gifts were items that would fit any woman, unless the fellow had a hugely oversized woman at home, and we figured if he had that he would have a girlfriend somewhere who would get the gift.

  We did run into a problem. Occasionally a pol or community leader was a woman. We gave her the same gift, and usually they were flattered. In Baltimore one evening we encountered a woman who must have weighed two hundred pounds. After that we were careful to take along a few gifts in our large-size line.

  We encountered a different problem in Cincinnati. There, an organization of women decided a Cheeks store would be degrading to women, and they set up a picket line outside our store on the night when we meant to introduce it to the civic leaders. I went out on the sidewalk to talk to these women, expecting to find a group of hefty, blue-haired, bespectacled women. They were nothing of the kind. Some were students from the University of Cincinnati. Some were young wives. Most of them were attractive.

  I spoke to them. “I would be very grateful if you would come inside,” I said. “I’d like for you to see the line of merchandise we expect to sell. If you find it degrades women, I will be very sorry. I sell the same line in most of the major cities of the United States. I’m not going to tell you that nobody objects, but very few do. Please come in and let me show you.”

  For an opening like this we displayed no restraints, no whips, no crotchless panties. That was routine with us. The women came in, some of them reluctantly, and saw our line of lingerie and swimsuits.

  “Maybe,” I said, “you would like to come in the back room and try on some of these items. I would like to tell you that my late wife, who died of cancer some years ago, wore Cheeks lingerie and wore it proudly.”

  A young woman—I have no idea who she was—spoke up and said, “I’ll try it.”

  In ten minutes about half the women who had come to protest were walking around in our merchandise, posturing in front of mirrors, and asking the prices of what they had on. We sold them what they were wearing. We didn’t give any of them anything, so it would not seem as if we were trying to buy them off. The young woman who had volunteered appeared before our civic leaders a little later, wearing one of our international-orange swimsuits. She turned out to be the wife of a city councilman.

  A late-middle-aged woman I would not have thought to be interested in revealing lingerie bought a sheer black nightgown that exposed every square inch of her body. She was wearing it when she said to me, “I never thought—It’s going to be like our wedding night, all over.”

  As we went around doing the shows, I had to restrain Filly from talking too much. Unrestrained, she would innocently say things like, “I guess it shows a lot of ass, but what it shows is what I’d want my boyfriend to see,” or “Y’notice, it covers your twat okay.”

  One night in Cleveland a prominent Democrat and clubwoman laughed nervously and said to Filly, “I’m not sure I could show myself to my husband in that.”

  “He’ll love it,” said Filly.

  “Well … I’m not sure. You see, my husband is a Presbyterian pastor.”

  “If he’s not a priest, he’ll love it,” said Filly.

  She had a talent for saying things that, coming from anyone else’s mouth, could have been offensive. But she seemed the very embodiment of youthful innocence—with, even so, a vague suggestion of narrow-eyed sensuality. Her figure was exactly right: newly ripened and as nearly ideal as any I ever saw since the night in 1944 when I first saw Giselle on the stage.

  She got propositions. She fended them off by saying she was my girl. Most of the people who saw us had figured that out anyway. Chief model. Anyone who believed that believed in the tooth fairy.

  Some nights we never slept at all, not at all, and crawled out of bed in the morning exhausted. We learned to hate linen sheets. They were abrasiv
e.

  * * *

  For six or seven months I maintained my balancing act between Filly and Melissa. I had fallen in love with Filly, but like any love affair, this one had matured. Cracks began to appear.

  Her crude vocabulary, which had seemed so refreshing when I first heard it, turned boring, then actually offensive. Filly wanted to fuck. She wanted my dick in her cunt. She liked to suck me off, and she liked to swallow my come, but she also wanted me to eat her pussy, which I did, and I loved every minute. She wanted me to grease my schlong with Vaseline and ram it up her ass. She wanted to do everything imaginable—some of it really placing on me demands I could barely meet—and she used the grossest conceivable words to express it. She was Kitty all over again.

  I don’t know. I was sixty years old, then sixty-one. She was twenty-two, then twenty-three. Thirty-eight years was too much difference. Filly made me feel old! I couldn’t maintain the pace.

  I could wish that had been all the problem.

  For some reason, I took her fishing. We rented a boat with crew on Cape Cod and went out to the end of the Cape, where the fish all but jumped into your boat.

  Filly loved it, or said she did. Her enthusiasm was infectious. After that, whenever we traveled where a boat could be rented and we could go fishing, we went. Later that year I began to open stores in south Florida, and boating and fishing became a bigger part of our lives. After sessions where I sold the idea of a Cheeks store and Filly modeled, we chartered boats and went out into the Gulf Stream to fish. We soon learned enough about boats that in time we didn’t charter anymore but just rented boats and ran them ourselves. Eventually I leased a boat. It was called the Key Princess.

  At Key Largo. Yes, the same Key Largo as in the film with Bogart and Bacall and Robinson. The guy who leased to me kept the boat fueled and maintained. I had to provide the food and drink, the fishing rods and bait, and so on. Sometimes we got into Key Largo late and slept on the boat, so as to get out early in the morning.

  Fishing out of Key Largo, you had to go out to sea some twenty-five miles so as to be outside the federal marine sanctuary. I was very much an amateur with boats and went out only when good weather was forecast, relying on my compass and my marine radio to make sure I was where I was supposed to be. If the radio advised us of deteriorating weather, we reeled in our lines and made for the Key.

  I remember the morning of January 27.

  We had arrived after ten the previous night and carried our food and gear aboard. Then we fucked. I remember that night as one of the few when Filly was easily satisfied. We fucked only once, and we went to sleep. She was edgy and restless. I might have taken note and been suspicious. Yeah. I might have.

  At dawn we cranked up the diesels and set out to sea.

  There was little wind and only gentle swells on the surface of the Atlantic as we headed eastward to get beyond the sanctuary. My thoughts were of tarpon and sailfish, though we had on one occasion hooked and lost an eight-foot shark.

  Filly was happy, and to make things more interesting she tossed aside her white T-shirt and stood topless beside me at the wheel. After a little while she broke out the rods and reels. The drill was that I would lower the engine revolutions to trolling speed, lock the wheel, and we would sit in the fishing chairs and hope for a bite. It was a routine we had followed many times, and we had brought in bonito, typically, and redfish, and one decent-size sailfish.

  I throttled back, locked the wheel, and walked into the stern. The bait was in a box there, and I opened the box and bent over, ready to bait both hooks.

  “Hi, Cooper.”

  I stiffened and turned. The voice was that of a man I recognized as soon as I saw him: Lou Chieppa, the greaseball hood who had held a knife to my throat in Philly and told me the big man was Ice Cream, not the Chef. This morning he was dressed in cutoff shorts and a blue Izod shirt.

  He stood, legs apart, menacing me with that ugly switchblade I had seen before.

  “Careful, Lou. He’s no pushover,” muttered Filly.

  “Heh-heh, heh-heh. Pushover. Yeah. Push him over is exactly what I’m gonna do. Just stand clear, Fil.”

  Filly. She’d set me up. My God, how long had they been planning this?

  Not from the beginning. I couldn’t believe it had been from the beginning. On the other hand, why had the painting contractor not shown up at Bookbinder’s? I knew why she’d shown up: the overheard phone call and so on. But the contractor…?

  I looked at her and shook my head. I’d been stupid!

  The bitch smirked.

  Chieppa moved forward, cautiously, on the balls of his feet.

  They’d made a fatal mistake. Buddy had taught me to fight with a razor, and over all these years I had always carried a folded straight razor in my right pocket, the way some men carry a penknife or a Swiss Army knife. Buddy had rehearsed me a thousand times in the movement I now had to make. It was like riding a bicycle—once you’ve learned, you can always do it.

  Chieppa struck. Or he meant to. But I stepped aside. And in one quick, well-learned, long-practiced movement, taught me years ago by Buddy and practiced a thousand times, I ran the razor across his throat, slitting it deep, cutting off his breath as he choked on his own gushing blood.

  He staggered against the gunwale, where he was unbalanced and half over the side. I grabbed him by the seat of his shorts and heaved him overboard.

  Filly screamed. Chieppa couldn’t swim. He floundered, splashing and throwing water—and, of course, gushing blood in great black-red gouts. The boat, though moving only at trolling speed, had opened ten or fifteen yards distance from him. Filly threw herself into the ocean and swam toward him as fast as she could.

  I ran into the cabin and reversed the engines. I backed toward them cautiously, aware that the propellers were as great a danger as drowning. I was already wondering how I was going to explain, back on the dock at Key Largo.

  Filly shrieked. Chieppa was gone. He had disappeared below the surface. Then she disappeared.

  My God! One moment she was there, searching frantically, and in the next moment she was gone!

  Chieppa’s blood and his thrashing had attracted sharks. They were in a feeding frenzy. I didn’t see what was happening underwater. I am glad I didn’t.

  I, too, screamed. I stopped the propellers and slumped over the wheel, sobbing.

  I had to think. Nobody had seen us come aboard last night. No one had been stirring when we eased away from the dock. The owner of the boat would see that it was out. He had no way to know if Filly was with me or not.

  Chieppa? I guess he had been hidden somewhere all night. Or maybe Filly had gotten up while I was asleep and signaled him to come aboard. He couldn’t make his move until we were well out at sea. He could kill me then and throw me overboard.

  So far as anyone knew, I had taken the Key Princess out alone. No one could know.

  Still sobbing, I tossed Filly’s fishing tackle overboard. And her shirt. And her handbag. Finally, her clothes and brush and cosmetics, which were in my bag. I dragged up buckets of seawater and sluiced Chieppa’s blood off the gunwale.

  I stayed at sea for eight more hours, crying and drinking beer.

  Then I went in.

  My friend, the owner of the boat, took charge of the Key Princess at the dock.

  “The young lady not with you this time, Mr. Cooper?”

  “Naah. You know how it is. She’s off someplace with her new boyfriend.”

  “I thought she really enjoyed fishing.”

  “I got another gal in mind who’ll enjoy it even more.”

  Just to be sure of the appearance of things, I flew Melissa to Florida a week later, and we went fishing off Key Largo.

  “Oh, this is marvelous, Jerry. Why did we never do it before? You’ve got to take time off for fishing. I love this place and this boat!”

  She caught a respectable sailfish, and the owner saluted me meaningfully when he saw Melissa and her fish. We returned to fish three
more times before I let the lease on the boat expire.

  I felt guilt. For Melissa. I’d betrayed her, and I couldn’t imagine she didn’t know it. I resolved to make it up to her, somehow.

  40

  “All of which,” Sal said when I told him, “doesn’t tell us who in Philadelphia was all that interested in having you whacked out—that is the fuckin’ question.”

  “Or why.”

  “Or why,” he agreed.

  “The guy who tried it—Chieppa—was with Don Napolitano, Ice Cream,” I said.

  “Ice Cream has been dead so long that God knows who Chieppa was with. Maybe he was just trying to make his bones. Maybe he was just trying to make himself a big guy. Incidentally, I’ve heard that he’d worked his way up some. Not everybody gave him any respect. For a lot of guys he was still the cheap little hustler. Some people called him Don Cheap.”

  “Well, Don Cheap sleeps with the fishes,” I said, nodding. “Inside the fishes.”

  “Too bad about the piece of tail.”

  “I couldn’t save her, Sal. No way. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I thought too much of her, and who knows what dumb thing I might have done if I’d had a chance? But I didn’t! She was just … gone.”

  Sal put a gentle hand on my shoulder and offered comfort. “Hey. She was something. But … me … I’d have slashed her, too.” Then he grinned. “Any time I get it in mind to whack out somebody, I’ll come to you. You did it great! Nobody’s ever going to figure out what happened to Don Cheap.”

  “He set himself up for it,” I said glumly. “And she did, too.”

  “They worked hard to set you up for it.”

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “We gotta find out who and why,” said Sal.

  I went back down to Philadelphia and discovered that my store managers regarded me with awe. That was a strange and unexpected development.

  Maybe they hadn’t known that Chieppa had gone to Florida to kill me, but they knew he had not come back from Florida. His rented car was found in a parking lot not far from the docks at Key Largo. In his one small bag was an airline ticket from Miami to Philadelphia.