by April Hill
Hank’s condo is at the beach. Malibu, yet, and no, they don’t pay detectives that much. It belongs to his sister, whose husband makes plumbing supplies or spins straw into gold or something. She keeps the beach place as a tax write-off and rents it to Hank at a sisterly rate. Anyway, once I was up and showered, Hank made a terrific lunch of Caesar salad and French bread, and we ate it on the deck overlooking the ocean, after which Hank took me back to bed, and joined me, there. By late afternoon, he had delivered the two most shattering, mind-altering orgasms of my life, so I decided I could forgive the spanking business. For the time being, anyway.
Just for the record, I’m really not what might be called "worldly." I had knocked around a bit in my time, though, and fallen in and out of enough beds to know a good thing when I saw it. Hank was a very good thing. A few years back, I spent one entire summer bedding a successful, almost world-famous gynecologist with some beautifully framed documents on his wall from Columbia Med and a six (approaching seven) figure income. I had this theory, back then, that knowing a lot about a woman’s equipment was a valuable asset when trying to please her in bed. What I discovered, though, was that familiarity with the Latin/Greek terms and specific locations of things does not always translate into orgasmic excellence.
Hank, on the other hand, who knows no Latin at all and just enough Greek to order the specials at the Olympus Diner on Fairfax, made me feel as though the single most important thing he would ever do in his entire life was to make me crawl the walls with pleasure. Too strong? Well, as a lady accustomed to smiling patiently and assuring my striving partner that "it" was wonderful, and that the Earth had moved, even when I’d spent most of my time watching the top of the guy’s head and wondering where I’d left my shoes, Hank was a revelation. Either he’d just been through a long dry spell himself and had "saved up," or Hank Everett was taking some very special vitamins. He repeated the afternoon matinee with an evening performance, and I woke up the next morning with the muscles of my inner thighs sore and my legs wobbly. I just couldn’t quit sighing, and when he brought me toast and orange juice in bed, I put a pillow over my head and started to giggle. Hey, I never claimed to be sophisticated.
I stayed there for three days, sitting on the beach until he got back from work each night and doing my best to wear him out when he did get home. When we were both exhausted from our efforts, we spent evenings in front of the fireplace, even though it was really too warm for a fire, just because it was so adorably romantic. We opened all the doors and windows and let the ocean breezes cool the place off. Ecologically irresponsible, but what the hell. The long drought was over, and I was slaking my thirst. My cup ranneth over.
I don’t want to bore anyone, but I should further explain, here, that Hank is very good-looking, in that craggy way men get at around forty, and for which forty-year-old women hate their guts unless they’re sleeping with them. I myself am not exactly Pig Woman, and have even been called "beautiful" once or twice in my life. (I know this is true, because I took careful notes at the time. I also remember a guy once referring to my body as "lush," but since I had just swilled down my third vodka, I may have misunderstood his precise meaning.) I’m only five foot two, have green eyes and reddish-brown hair, which I keep long because it’s so fatally attractive to men and because haircuts cost too much, and am considered by many men (well, a couple, anyway) to have a body to die for. Please don’t ask for references, names or dates. I forget. I am fairly well-endowed, as they say, in the upper section, and possibly a bit too-well endowed in the lower, but you’d be surprised at how few complaints I’ve had from men about that aspect of my anatomy. I like to think I'm the sort of woman who looks best naked.
There’s a possibility, here, that I may be overdoing my description of Hank’s strong points, and if I have, I’m sorry, but it’s my story, so deal with it. To begin with, he has this great laugh. The kind of laugh that starts low somewhere, and comes out soft and mellow and warm, and that makes you feel like everything you’ve said is world-class funny and should be written down for posterity. He listens, too. He looks you right in the eye when you’re talking, and even if the phone rings, he waits until you finish your sentence, then reaches for it without taking his eyes off yours. His eyes are ice-blue, and he’s got this wonderful, sort of shy, all-American boy grin, and he also has smiling eyes, and I don’t have any idea at all what that means, but it's true.
Yeah. I was already nuts about him.
On the morning of the third day, when we’d been asleep for maybe two hours, and after what I can very honestly call the absolute best uninterrupted six hours I have ever spent anywhere, the phone on Hank’s side of the bed rang. As one of the world’s leading authorities on how to ignore obtrusive phone calls, I simply pulled a pillow over my head and mumbled to Hank to do the same, but he picked up on the third ring. He even sounded lucid. That superb police academy training, I assumed, but my feelings were hurt, nevertheless. I have always aspired to being the kind of woman from whose bed men leave completely drained of energy and initiative.
But what bothered me even more was the look on Hank’s face.
He hung up the phone, and was out of bed and into his pants before I had my eyes fully open.
"What’s the matter?" I asked, probably more irritably than was polite, considering the very nice evening we'd just shared.
"They’ve found another hand at your place," he said, stuffing yesterday’s shirt into his waistband.
"So, why do you have to go?" I whined. I whine easily at this time of morning.
Hank was sitting on the bed, now, tying his shoes. "It’s a right hand."
I came instantly alert. Unless poor Larry had been a medical anomaly, this wasn’t good news. The hand the police found in the McDonald's coffee cup was a right hand.
"I’m going with you," I cried, leaping out of bed to rummage around for my clothes.
"No, you’re not," said Hank, in that firm, police voice of his. "You’re going to stay here and wait for me to call. As soon as I know something, I’ll call."
I already had my underwear on, sort of, and my shoes in my hand, and faced him squarely.
"I’m going, so just shut up about it." At this point, I threw a smallish but fairly high-quality tantrum. Hank looked at his watch, (I’m not kidding) and before it dawned on me why he was checking his schedule, he had pushed me across the footboard of his bed, dragged my panties to my ankles and dealt my bare butt the first of maybe fifteen or twenty hard whacks with a long-handled plastic shoe horn, while I yelped, bobbed up and down from one foot to the other, and made ugly faces at the gross injustice of it.
"If you don’t let me go with you, I'll just get a cab over there," I threatened. "You can do whatever you want to me, but it's my house, and I have every right…."
He landed a couple of final, stinging smacks across the backs of my thighs and pulled me back up. "All right, then, but when we get there, you’re to stay in the car." He scowled. "Someone could be watching your place. If I see you so much as take one step toward that house, I’m going to bring you back here and set your ass on goddamned fire. Got it?" Just to be sure I "got it," he gave my very sore ass another quick reminder with the belt he was preparing to put on.
I agreed, lying through my teeth, of course, and finished dressing, being very careful not to touch my rear portions. This spanking thing seemed to be turning into a habit.
At only nine o’clock, it was already hot as hell outside. Even at the beach, where there was a still a trace of a cool morning fog, I could tell it was going to be one of those dry, suffocating L.A. days when the scalding Santa Ana winds make you wonder why the hell any human being would live here voluntarily. By the time we were in the Valley, the air was like a furnace.
We turned past the decaying stucco arch that served as the entrance gate to the "Watercolor Ranchos," and then onto Avenida de Arboles Grandes— my street, and another big fat PR lie. There’s not a tree in sight, grandes or otherwise. When
I caught sight of my White Rancho, at the top of the hill, I feel suddenly chilled. The air conditioning, maybe, but the house no longer looked just ugly and squat. It looked sinister.
* * *
CHAPTER FOUR
Before we go any further, I should probably tell you a little more about my house. Well, Mom’s house, really. It had been built somewhere in the early fifties by a builder with no talent, no taste, and an unhealthy obsession with big, ugly rocks. The house itself was made of white stucco, imbedded with what must have been hundreds of pounds of glittery mica chips, so that the entire house sparkled when the sun hit it, giving it the look of one of those Styrofoam Christmas ornaments we all had to make in kindergarten. The roof was totally flat and covered with white chunky rocks the size of your fist, like the house has just survived a meteor storm. From window level down, the stucco was covered in fake fieldstone, painted white with an occasional fake gray one to make it look natural. There was no lawn, since that would require water, but I did have a quarter-acre of white gravel, garnished here and there with a couple of scrawny cactus, pieces of driftwood and a rusted wagon wheel. Oh, and the cow skull, of course.
What can I say. It was a southern California classic.
Inside the house, Mom had done her part in preserving this masterpiece by leaving everything the way she found it when she bought the "model" completely furnished from the builder. Not too surprisingly, the guy’s business tanked when it was discovered that he built exceptionally ugly houses on geologically unstable hillside lots. My kitchen had avocado green appliances, most of them (except the mouse-gnawed dishwasher) in remarkably good working condition, unfortunately, and the lone bathroom was outfitted with porcelain fixtures of the same shade. Oh, and I had swans, too. Tiled aqua swans a’swimming among the cattails, circling the tub and toilet. The living room furniture was early dentist office, done in intense shades of coral "leatherette" with black wrought-iron legs.
There was a fake fireplace, made of fake white brick, equipped with a fake log, and when I flipped on the single orange bulb tucked behind the ersatz log, I could pretend, if I crossed my eyes and squinted narrowly, that I was basking in the warmth of a glowing fire. I’d discovered that tequila helped the effect. My lamp shades were squat parchment cylinders that look alarmingly like human skin, squiggled all over with Jackson Pollock-like drips of black paint.
The decor in the house ran to big hand-blown glass clowns and resin grape clusters, and when the penguin wasn’t serving as a weapon of defense, he was a paperweight/doorstop.
My bedroom had blond "ultra modern" 1950’s furniture, and a brown fuzzy chair shaped exactly like a teddy bear. Mom had put this atrocity in my bedroom because "Teddy" was mine when I was little and tasteless—a gift from one of Mother’s many husbands. The chair arms were his paws, and the back of the seat was Teddy’s body and head. His head was round, with big droopy eyes and a black plastic nose in the middle that left a dent in the back of your head if you sat too long. Adorable.
The White Rancho occupied one of the premier, "view lots," and had miraculously survived its encounter with the county building inspector. The only thing left of the original development, aside from my place, the crumbling Green Rancho and the pink house that belonged to the aforementioned Mr. Frankie, was a sea of curb cuts and cracked driveways. My little house may not have been pretty, but it would have made a good movie set—f the movie was about mutant survivors of a nuclear disaster.
* * *
When Hank and I came up the long hill that morning, the street was packed with cars, mostly rubberneckers drawn by the buzz of police activity. Arranging themselves in a semi-circle around the cul-de-sac was a large contingent of senior citizens, apparently on a field trip from nearby Shady Lane Acres, which as far as I can tell has no shade, no lane, and sits on considerably less than even one acre. Several late-arriving blue-haired ladies were just descending from their little blue "scoot bus" and unfolding plastic-webbed lawn chairs on the hot pavement. The rear bumper of the senior bus sported a giant yellow happy face and a big sticker emblazoned with the message, "We’re spending our children’s inheritance!" Soon enough, the seniors were all chatting amiably, munching oatmeal raisin cookies, and sipping from little cardboard juice boxes.
When he saw the circus that had already congregated, Hank swore loudly and opened his window to slap the gadget he calls a "cherry" on top of the car. Several civilian vehicles moved reluctantly aside to let us through, and I could see that there were maybe seven or eight black and white police vehicles already parked at skewed angles directly in front of the house. A large van with an LAPD emblem on it was blocking the driveway, and a KNBC minicam truck was setting up shop behind it.
The front and back yards had been staked out and cordoned off with neon-yellow plastic tape, along with most of the cul-de-sac. At the back of the house, a guy in a backhoe was ripping up the patio slab and dumping the broken concrete into a ragged heap on the garage side. Hank pulled behind the gaggle of black and whites and got out, pointing one finger at me in warning.
"Stay in the car," he ordered, "And keep the doors locked." I nodded, but it was so hot outside, I didn’t actually want to get out, anyway. Hank’s grim look suggested that if I crossed him, he’d deliver the spanking he’d promised, even if he had to do it in front of the assembled crowd. With the engine still running, it was deliciously cool inside the car, so I was perfectly content to wait here. My freshly-spanked behind still burned slightly, and though I wouldn’t have admitted it right then, my stomach was in knots, and I was fighting back a growing wave of terror.
I watched Hank walk up the sidewalk, pausing to talk to a couple of uniformed policemen before continuing around the side of the house to where several guys in shirtsleeves were huddled, talking. Other official-looking types swarmed about my backyard with various pieces of equipment, carrying what looked like brown paper grocery sacks. The yard, which normally looked like it was covered in fist-sized hailstones, now looked like it had been attacked by giant, mutant gophers. I groaned. Mom was going to have a cow when she saw the damage.
No sooner had this thought crossed my mind than Mona’s battered turquoise-blue Cadillac careened to a stop behind the police vehicles, and Mom sprang from the passenger seat. She was attired from head to festive toe in hot pink, and her skin-tight pink "toreador" pants were complimented nicely by a floppy pink straw hat and giant pink sunglasses. I was probably forty yards from the Cadillac, but I could still hear her agonized shrieks as she stormed imperiously up the devastated sidewalk, ripping out yards of yellow police tape with a wide swoop of one skinny arm. Obviously unaware that Mom was protesting the wholesale destruction of a historical landmark, two uniformed cops at the end of the sidewalk tried to grab her, but she darted around them and kept going. Flopping her flabby arms like an injured flamingo, she tottered across the ravaged yard on pink open-toed sandals with three-inch heels. If I'd had a video camera with me, I could have made a bundle on The World's Stupidest Videos.
Suddenly, the two cops she'd managed to evade nabbed her from the rear, lifting her by her elbows just seconds before she stomped through the crime scene. Mom turned her bright red head and bit one of the cops on his beefy forearm.
Pandemonium.
I got out of the car, intending to rush to my mother's rescue the way a good daughter should, but a large man in a damp blue suit and a sweaty red face moved in front of me, blocking my way. I could tell from the guy’s unfriendly glare that he didn’t want to discuss the situation calmly. I shrugged my shoulders, left Mom to her fate, and strolled back down to where the Caddie was parked, behind the senior bus. Mona was sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking like a Texas oil refinery, with the air-conditioner running full-tilt to re-circulate the cigarette smoke. Since our last meeting, Mona’s hair had changed color again. It was sort of wine-red now, like a cheap Merlot, or maybe a Hearty Burgundy, with orange Kool-Aid highlights.
Mona cracked her window just wide enough to
talk without losing the air conditioning or her second-hand smoke. Mona says re-inhaling saves money.
"Your Mother done it again," she said, shaking her head in disgust. "That woman ain’t got the brains God gave a dog turd! You better get hold of her and get her outta’ there before she gets one a’ her damn spells and whops one of them asshole cops. She gonna’ get her fuckin’ head bashed in."
It was too late. Mother had already "whopped" half the cops present, and was now being escorted off the property by two burly uniformed officers, who were carrying her gingerly between them by her skinny elbows. They looked scared, so I walked over to rescue them, checking quickly for Hank’s whereabouts.
"This is my mother, officers," I offered helpfully.
"Some people have all the luck," snarled the bigger of the cops, who was the size of a house. "Some people get all the breaks. You got a car?" Why are people always asking me that? I explained very politely that I was with their colleague, Lieutenant Everett, and therefore, a person of some import, and that they should please deposit my screaming mother in his car for the moment. They released her with obvious relief. Whereupon Mother began swinging her ropes of pink plastic pearls at them and calling them "Fucking Fascists." She had absolutely no idea what a Fascist was, but I used the term a lot in college, and Mom had always liked the sound of it.