Velma had been a quiet woman, more introverted than Lamont and it was that quality that had drawn Lamont to her from the first time he spied her across the banquet room in the magnate's house. Her even brown skin of her face, with its luminous brown eyes and full pink lips framed by her maid's cap, conveyed a quiet and possibly shy woman.
But once Lamont got to know Velma, he discovered that she opened dramatically to those she knew and trusted intimately. When they first made love in the servants' quarters when their employers had gone south to Florida and left the servants to keep the house going in their absence, Lamont laughed at how much she talked in the afterglow. He loved hearing her talk as he traced her nubile body with his hands, nuzzling against the nape of her naturally sweet-smelling neck.
Their union happened this way. Lamont had been in the employ of the magnate for several years when the housekeeper, reaching the end of her working years, hired a new housekeeper who brought Velma and two other maids into the house. At first, Lamont did not notice Velma, although she noticed him due to his mellifluous voice as he instructed the wait staff as to their roles and responsibilities for an upcoming banquet to celebrate the Fourth of July.
It wasn't until the actual banquet that Lamont looked up from his duties and noticed the young, beautiful maid who carefully tended to her tasks with quiet determination and deft skill. He thought to himself, "I've got to have her!" The thought surprised Lamont, because he had not felt any stirring in himself for someone of the opposite sex ever since his first wife perished from cholera.
But now, Velma's quietness only served to agitate Lamont, though he did his best to hide his true feelings from her, mostly because he suspected he equally agitated her. However, they were stuck together, inside a house that offered little more than basic drafty shelter from the outside elements.
Lamont no longer felt like going into the various shops nearby, the ones he patronized in earlier, more profitable days, to engage in idle talk with the locals who made those shops more a place of gossip than a place of commerce.
Velma rarely went out as well, except to go and make the meager purchases, which still had to be made every few days to stave off hunger.
And now, here they were, in the dying glow of the fireplace in their bedroom, naked, looking at each other in their post-coital state of sadness when suddenly, the outside quiet of the dark October evening of drizzle and fog exploded with the shouts of paperboys crying out the headlines from the late edition newspaper.
Lamont turned his head, listening to the muffled, though loud, cries. He bit at his lip. Giving up the daily newspaper had been up there with the giving up of his pipe tobacco. The newspaper was a habit even older than the tobacco, having been taught to read by his very first employer when he was but a teenager. Once he learned, he consumed every printed book, article and newspaper he could find.
The shouts intensified through the closed windows and thick curtain. Lamont's mind craved the printed words and the news that was serious enough for the newsboys to shout headlines at this hour.
He lamented the stinging shame he felt, not knowing what was happening in the world, thinking that only criminals in prison are kept from hearing what goes on beyond their bars.
Those shouts, hoarse and sharp, meant something exciting was at hand, something to ease the boredom and frustration in his mind, to make him forget his own troubles in lieu of someone else's.
Lamont rose, his thick penis flaccid. Sex was no longer on his mind. He wrapped his robe around himself and went to the window, peeking through the curtains and straining to listen.
One word was clear amongst the shouts and cries of the young boys shilling the evening edition: "Murder!"
Velma took her own robe and slid it over her buxom frame. Lamont watched her, feeling a slight stir in his loins as her breasts disappeared behind the folds of the robe. Despite their situation, both financially and relationally, he loved Velma and desired her above everything else... except the desire to ascertain what exactly was being shouted outside. He listened, deciphering more words: "Horrible Murder! Murder at Battery Park!"
Lamont frowned. He remembered that another murder had been committed near Battery Park -- one concerning a servant maid who had poisoned her employer, a cold and bitter woman who was rumored to beat her employees as if they were still slaves. Of course, that murder was many years ago, but Lamont still remembered it vividly, as it affected the class to which he had then belonged.
The newsboys -- there were three of them -- were an unusual sight at this hour on Lankershim Avenue. Rarely did the newsboys come down this street. They usually kept to the streets where the gaslights were more prominent. Yet they were coming nearer and nearer to the house.
They had adopted another cry, but it escaped Lamont's ears for their cries were becoming more and more hoarse and excited. It took a moment before he could interpret their headline callout, suddenly: The Hangman! The Hangman strikes again!
Velma stood beside Lamont and heard those terrible words. By instinct, she pressed close to Lamont. He offered his arm around her as they saw the newsboys in the fog and rain-spattered windows, resembling gremlins creeping through the darkness.
During the last two weeks, four strange and violent murders had been committed in Charleston, all within the city limits, but on the side of town opposite from the Barneses' home.
The first murder had been fairly unremarkable and had initially been considered some sort of suicidal act. The second earned a tiny paragraph on the last page of the newspaper -- the last one Lamont read before cutting out this luxury.
Then the third murder, which came in with a wave of fevered excitement, as a note had been pinned to the victim's dress, belonging to a prostitute who frequented the harbor often. The note was written in red ink, although it was eventually determined to be the victim's blood, and printed in a very elegant hand these words:
TRULY YOURS, THE HANGMAN
At that point, law enforcement and those who still kept up with current events (who could afford to) and found perverse interest in such lurid tales, deduced that all three murders had been committed by the same dark force in the guise of a man. Before that fact had even soaked into the public's consciousness, now another murder had been performed, and once again the murderer had taken great care to make it clear that he was the reason behind this terrible, bloodthirsty craft.
Everyone was talking about the Hangman and his crimes. Even the man who delivered their tiny pint of milk each morning went on at great length each morning with the Barneses about what the Hangman had done to the bodies of the poor victims.
The Hangman identified himself as such because, no surprise, he hanged his victims. But the terrible crime went beyond hanging. The Hangman also eviscerated his victims, leaving their entrails and viscera to hang below their twisting bodies, savage and brutal.
Lamont returned to the fire and began working it into a brighter pitch. He looked at Velma with mild excitement, but upon seeing her tired, apathetic expression, he felt a hornet's sting of irritation. He felt he could have shaken her hard with his large hands!
"What?" she asked.
"That look on your face," he said.
"I'm hurting," she said. "I swear you're too big for me," she said as she briefly gestured down below at her thighs.
"Oh," he said. Had he misread her, or was she lying to him, using sex as an excuse for irritation at him?
Velma hardly listened earlier that day when Lamont had come back to bed after the milkman had dropped off the daily pint and daily news about the Hangman. Lamont had gotten into the habit of sliding close to her in the mornings, pressing his manhood against her peach-shaped bottom until his erection poked her between her buttocks. It annoyed her, because something in her had extinguished whatever flames of passion she had once felt for her husband.
She supposed she still loved him in some way. He had cared for her and provided her with a home that her family would have considered a palace. He str
uggled to find ways to bring in money, although it was only in dribs and drabs. She tried to reciprocate sex with him, but the best she could do is react neither positively nor negatively. Instead, she just turned off, which is why she hardly listened when Lamont came back to bed with news of the Hangman's latest.
It wasn't until Lamont began describing the lurid, horrid details of the murders that she snapped at Lamont and rose early from the bed. She and Lamont slept in the nude still, mostly because Lamont had insisted early in their marriage that the two things he wanted to see in the morning were the sun shining and his wife's naked body.
She obliged him all these years and he still enjoyed watching her walk across the room, her pendulous breasts swaying, nipples dark like some ripe fruit, the patch of pubic hair above her vagina an inviting garden and her rump, still firm and perfectly shaped.
Although Lamont had taken on weight like most men of his age and current state, he was still strong and he still possessed a large cock that could become erect fairly quickly, though not as quickly as it did in his younger years, when he would typically awake rock hard.
Despite the lack of interest in Velma, she couldn't deny Lamont's giftedness. She remembered the first time she saw it, that large rod of ebony, that night in the servant's quarters. She had gone down on him eagerly at the sight of it, unable to control herself as her passion nearly consumed her on the spot. She could still remember her velvet tongue encircling the remarkably soft flesh of the tip, tasting the salty tang of his come when he could no longer contain himself as she worked on him with a feverish abandon. He had gasped as he came and came, his large body nearly wracked in muscular spasm as Velma stroked him and cupped his balls, smiling as she kissed the tip.
That had been so long ago and now, the fires had died down in her. For Lamont, the fires had dwindled in him as well, although his body was still trying to recapture the passion of their early years together.
And there Velma was, walking across the room after having snapped at Lamont, while his erection died there in the bed and he looked at her, puzzled that she didn't wish to hear any more graphic nonsense about the murderer stalking Charleston.
The puzzled look on Lamont's face was mostly because Velma had enjoyed hearing shocking or scandalous news. In the older, happier days, when Lamont could afford the newspaper, he would read of the exciting mysteries and thrilling cases reported in his melodious voice while Velma sat in rapt attention. For Lamont, it was a two-fold pleasure: reading such salacious tales and seeing Velma hang on his words as they flowed from his lips like liquid amber.
His puzzlement gave way to dullness and misery and he decided he would stop caring about how she felt. The news was important to him, her irritability be damned.
And so, as Lamont stood at the window, peering into the fog-shrouded night, he stepped away from Velma, slipped on his pants underneath his robe and stepped into his boots.
Velma remained still, clutching her robe against the chill. Lamont took one look at her as he slid his hand into his pocket and felt the few coins that remained there. He turned around, opened the bedroom door and went into the dark hall.
Velma took one step from the window as she heard Lamont open the front door.
Walking down the small cobblestone path outside, Lamont flung open the black iron gate, careful not to step in the pools of water accumulating on the pavement. He stopped in his tracks, breathing in the damp air. The coins in his pocket seemed smaller and he thought about how much food they would afford.
One of the newsboys ran up to Lamont with a damp copy of the evening paper. "Give me a copy," he said without another thought toward food or other necessities, "But don' give me that soggy mess in your hands. Get a dry one out of your satchel, boy," Lamont said, placing a coin in the child's gloved hand.
The boy nodded and produced a bone-dry copy of the evening paper from his leather satchel. Lamont felt the twinges of buyer's remorse as he folded the paper under his arm and returned to the front gate of his home.
The raw, cold air made him shiver; yet the thought of news filled him with anticipation as he raced back to the front door and the somewhat warmer state of the house.
Thanks to what he had spent rather frivolously, he had gained a relatively guilty pleasure of an hour, something to stave off the anxiety and misery he usually felt when thinking about their financial state.
It irritated him to no end knowing these moments of respite would not be shared with Velma, as they once did.
A hot, stinging wave of unease and remorse swept over Lamont. Velma would have never spent that money on herself so carelessly. She was frugal and not given in to spending sprees as the wives of former employers were want to do so often. Lamont knew that well enough. If it hadn't been so cold, foggy and drizzly, he would have gone back out again through the gate and down the street to stand under the nearest street lamp to read with eager abandon.
Now he dreaded Velma's reproving glare, her chocolate brown eyes blazing with hot coals at their center. It was a glare that communicated her displeasure, disgust and anger at wasting money on something that wasn't necessary.
In the darkened hallway, Lamont heard Velma, cross and anxious, "What on God's green earth are you doing out there, Lamont Barnes? Get yourself in here before you catch cold and die on me! I can't afford you being sick along with everything else." While it wasn't rare for Velma to display her displeasure with a look, it was exceedingly rare for her to use so many words in one exchange these days.
Lamont walked up to her as she stood silhouetted in the fading light of the bedroom. There was enough light to pierce the fabric of her robe, revealing her frame under the robe. Irritated or not, Lamont thought that by God, he had a fine woman as a wife. While most women had gained weight and faded past their child-rearing years, Velma had endured. Her silhouette teased that much, but whatever ardor Lamont felt in him, it was ground into dust once the moment seized itself again.
"I went to get a paper," he said in the cheerless dark. He cleared his throat, remembering he was the head of the household and he had as much right to spend money as she did. "I want to know what's going on with this Hangman."
It dawned on him that he had sold everything he had owned, ever personal item, every gift he'd ever received from grateful employers for his tireless, careful service and yet, here was Velma, in the doorway, her hand on the doorpost, a wedding ring still in place on her finger.
Lamont stepped past her, brought the paper out from under his arm and placed it on his chair. He turned to the fire and poked it briskly with the fire rod until flames licked at the burning wood once more and a steadier light returned to the room.
Velma said nothing, but he knew she resented his newfound joy. Then, as he went to light a nearby lantern, he said loudly, as a means of justifying his purchase, "Besides, I want to see if our ad is still in there!"
She relented, just a little. She glanced at the front door and the sign affixed to the window beside the front door. From the other side, facing the street, it read "APARTMENT AVAILABLE" in Velma's careful print.
Lamont sat down in his nice armchair and poked at the banked fire once more. Warmth spread across him as the flames licked into existence. This and the small hiss of the lantern comforted him. The cries of the newsboys outside faded into the distance.
Velma's face felt flushed. She was not used to being treated this way. Lamont typically was a mild-mannered man, so the few instances of being loud or angered shocked her still.
She stepped into her slippers and began tidying up the room, picking up the blanket from the floor and folding it before dropping it into a clothesbasket in the corner of the room.
Her hands trembled slightly, out of anger, frustration and excitement. She hated having to worry about the cost of a newspaper, but worry she did. Why couldn't he understand that?
Once the blanket was put away, Velma stood there in the room, waiting for Lamont to look at her. Lamont deliberately avoided looking at her,
burying his head between the newsprint pages. After a long moment, she sighed and adjusted her robe before lying down on the bed.
Sugar in Her Bowl Page 2