by Orrie Hitt
She sat down on the davenport and the split in her housecoat traveled to a point midway between her knees and thighs, revealing a pink slip underneath.
“Well, I’m a writer,” I said. “And a friend of her father. Dr. Call asked me if I would be kind enough to send him her address. I thought you might be able to help.”
Elsa Lang sighed and blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. Her breasts, whenever she took a deep breath, pushed out round and full against the housecoat.
“I don’t have her address,” she said, still smiling. “Therefore, it would be quite impossible for me to help you.
“I see. But I thought you were her friend.”
“I am.”
“When I met Miss Call, Friday night, she spoke of the possibility of coming to the city to work. She mentioned your name to me at that time and it was only natural I would assume that you might know where she had gone. She said you were trying to get her a job.”
“I did get her a job.”
“Where?”
Some of the friendliness in the girl’s face disappeared and she crushed out the cigarette in an ash tray.
“Look,” she said. “I don’t know why you came here and I don’t know why you’re so interested in Judith Call. But I’ll tell you this. Judith was so sick of her life in New Rockford that she didn’t know what to do. She asked me to find her a job. And I did. But where she went or who she’s working for I couldn’t say. All I know is that I phoned her on Friday night and made an appointment to meet her downtown near the theatre. She got there, about five minutes late, and I gave her the name and the address of a man who said he could use her. I haven’t heard from her since that time and I haven’t seen her. And that, Mr. Morgan, is all I know.”
“Incredible,” I said, staring at her.
“What is?”
“Not knowing where she is.”
“Well, I’m not her keeper, am I? I just did the little thing a favor, making it possible for her to get out and get started on her own. What am I supposed to do, put a leash on her so she can follow me around?”
I frowned and lit a cigarette. My first impression on the train about the blonde had been wrong. She was no reflection of the young schoolgirl type. Kind words or flattery wouldn’t get me very far with Elsa Lang.
“Well, the hell with it,” I said, reversing my tactics. “So I can’t find her. So what?”
The blonde favored me with another smile.
“So her old man’ll blow his cork, that’s what. And it’ll serve him right. He never did treat her the way he should have.”
I don’t know why I felt obligated to find Judith Call. Certainly it had no direct bearing upon the work I was doing for the church. And surely it wasn’t because I felt that her father’s attitude toward her had been just and fair or that she didn’t have a legitimate right to seek out something better for herself. Perhaps it was simply a haunting regret that she should feel that part of her own personal world was against her when, in fact, it was merely a matter of misunderstanding. Or perhaps it was because she reminded me of a very beautiful girl who no longer lived. But, whatever it was, I was under a compulsion to find this girl. What might happen after that I didn’t know. It didn’t seem to matter very much. Finding Judith Call seemed to be the big thing I had to do.
“Judith told me that you’re a model, Miss Lang.”
“Stockings and bras.”
“I guess you do quite well at it.”
She shrugged and got to her feet.
“You can always do better.” She looked around the apartment. “Money. A person can never have enough of it.”
The apartment, by almost any standard, was comfortable and modern. It would have pleased most people. But I could tell that it wasn’t satisfactory to Elsa Lang.
“You’re a writer, Mr. Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“I guess you do quite well at it,” she said, in mimicry of my own remark.
“It has its ups and downs.”
She took another cigarette from the end able and lit it.
“Now we know all about each other,” she said. “Isn’t it a comfortable feeling, Mr. Morgan?”
She was laughing at me and I knew it. Frankly, I don’t like to have people laugh at me. We all have a niche in this little old world. Some of us are important. Some of us aren’t. But, sooner or later, we all revert to the status of being very unimportant. It hardly seems worth fighting about.
“You’ve forgotten me,” I said. “I saw you on the train Friday night.”
“No. I didn’t forget you. I thought you were a student.”
“And I thought you were a high school girl.” She laughed, pleased with my observation, and much of the tension seemed to leave the room.
“Would you care for a drink?”
“If you have rye and soda.”
We had a couple of drinks together and talked a little. She was older than I had thought, almost twenty. She told me that she had been ill for two years as a youngster with rheumatic fever and, therefore, her graduation from high school had been delayed. I gathered from her conversation that she had a great dislike for New Rockford, her family and almost everybody in the town. She returned there for week-ends occasionally, possibly to gloat, and the thought of ever living there again was revolting. She was, I decided, an unhappy girl. Unhappy and brittle and hard.
“Well,” I said finally, “I’ve made a thorough nuisance of myself and have drunk quite a lot of your whiskey. I’m wondering if I might be able to interest you in dinner.”
Actually, I wasn’t at all hungry but I thought if I could talk to her further, get to know her better, that I might be able to learn something about Judith Call’s whereabouts. The mystery surrounding the girl had intrigued me.
“I have a ravenous appetite,” she said, without the slightest hesitation. “You’ll be sorry, Mr. Morgan.” I waited while she went into the bedroom and dressed. She called out to me once, telling me to help myself to the rye, but I didn’t bother with another drink. I had picked up a photo album from one of the end tables and I was looking at that. There were several pictures of Elsa in a bathing suit, a couple of good commercial shots of her legs which, incidentally, were mighty attractive, and two or three of her modeling a popular-priced bra. I happened to be looking at one of the photos of her in a peek-a-boo strapless bra when she came out.
“I never wear one myself,” she said matter of factly. “But that doesn’t mean to say that the day won’t come when I’ll need an assist.”
From the appearance of her figure under the sheer black dress that time was a long way off. Her breasts were wide apart and slightly uptilted, their generous cones thrusting boldly outward. The dress was tight around her narrow belly but it flowed out in soft waves over her rounded hips. She had applied a very dark lipstick to her mouth, not too much, and she had added some color to her cheeks. Her hair, now that the curlers had been removed, fell down across her shoulders, framing her face in a blonde semi-circle of loveliness. She was, I was forced to admit, an extremely attractive and desirable woman.
“You ought to do well as a model,” I observed. “You have all of the necessary equipment.”
“Now, now, Mr. Morgan,” she cautioned laughingly. “Don’t let your emotions get the best of you.”
We left the apartment and while we were on our way out to the street we decided it would be much simpler if she called me Bill and I called her Elsa. It’s funny, but you always get around to that sooner or later.
There was a little place on Fourth Avenue, near the Mall, where I went frequently. It was an unpretentious restaurant specializing in Italian food, but it had a cozy atmosphere and one which I felt would meet all the requirements of the occasion. Elsa accepted my suggestion quickly and when we finally caught a cab I told the driver to take us over to Ruby’s.
Dinner was good and although I had tussled with a steak only a few hours before I managed to consume most of the spaghetti. Elsa ordered a fille
t, medium, and she said it was by far the best she had had in a long time. During dinner we consumed a bottle of Italian wine, both enjoying the deep, rich flavor age had given it.
“You’re a funny guy,” she said finally. “You walk into my apartment, ask a lot of questions about another girl and then take me to dinner. What’s your angle, Bill?”
I grinned. “Who knows? I told you I’m a writer. Maybe that explains it.”
“Maybe it does,” she agreed. “And I’m a model. Perhaps that tells a little bit about me, too.”
She was beginning to feel the effects of the wine and when she started talking about her work I didn’t interrupt. She worked for one of the agencies in the midtown section. Not a large agency, but one with several connections in the garment industry. Most of the work was in stockings, bras, girdles and things like that. Sometimes she got an assignment to work one of the showrooms, demonstrating the latest in feminine unmentionables to out-of-town buyers.
“A lot of the girls won’t do it,” she said. “Of course every firm has its rules but you can’t keep the hands of some of those buyers off you. It isn’t enough that they see a bra at a distance of six inches. They want to feel of it, too. And they want to hang on.”
Once in a while, she said, she was asked to help entertain some of the buyers and, frequently, a buyer would insist upon additional favors before he would consent to placing an order.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Bill.” The wine had long since disappeared and we were drinking rye and soda. Her eyes were quite dull by this time and she gave every indication of having difficulty focusing them on my face. “But I kind of like you. I don’t know why. But I do.”
“And I think you’re all right, too, Elsa.”
I don’t like to lie to people. I hadn’t been brought up that way and I’d never accomplished very much whenever I’d tried it. But this situation with Elsa was different. I either went along with her in everything she did and said or I left her alone. There wasn’t, as far as I could see, any other choice.
“We get a bonus if we help get an order,” she said. She thought about that for a moment and her mouth twisted at the corners. “Well, it’s a living. What more can anybody expect?”
Quite often, she said, she went to parties. Not that she always enjoyed them but it was one way of meeting different people in the trade, part of the price that you had to pay if you wanted to stay in the rat race. The week before, on Wednesday, she had been to one and she had met a man looking for a new face, someone who might be able to pose for still shots. She couldn’t remember his name or his address or anything about him but she’d taken his card and she’d given it to Judith Call.
“Hell,” Elsa said tiredly. “I didn’t know everybody was going to get excited about it. She wanted a job, any kind of a job, and I found her one. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“You acted like there was when you came barging in on me. You acted like I should know all about her. God, Bill, this is a big city. You make one left turn when you should go right and you wind up a long way off.”
In a way, she was expressing my feelings and worries. Judith was a small-town girl accustomed to small-town living. And she was bitter. It was a combination which, if she failed to be prudent, could get her into much trouble. One left turn …
“Does Judith have your telephone number?”
Elsa regarded me without interest for a moment. I noticed that she was breathing very heavily, her pointed breasts rising and falling beneath the dress. Her hands, as they reached out and touched mine, were warm and damp.
“You worry too damn much,” she told me. “Of course, she has my number.” Her hands circled my fingers, squeezing them. “Let’s get out of here, Bill. God, I can’t stay in the same place hour after hour!”
I paid the check and when we got outside I asked her where she wanted to go.
“My apartment,” she said, clinging to my arm. “Can you think of a better place?”
She sat very close to me in the cab, her thigh against mine, the deep musk smell of her perfume all around us. It occurred to me, rather suddenly, that in many ways Elsa was like Judith Call. She was bitter, too, but it was a different kind of bitterness. She found relief in taking from the world what she wanted when she wanted it. At the moment, it seemed, she wanted me. Or, perhaps any man would have been acceptable. Any man who could give her the feeling of being wanted, of being needed.
“You can kiss me, Bill.”
I kissed her, not because I wanted to kiss her but because, at the moment, it was the thing to do.
Her lips were warm and parted and soft. Somewhat surprised, I found myself enjoying the kiss, holding it long after she had ceased to respond.
“Bill,” she whispered. “Let’s wait. Not here in the cab.”
“And not if you don’t want to.”
“But I do. You know I do.”
It had been a long time since Sandy. I gripped Elsa’s hand.
The cab stopped in front of the apartment and I paid the driver. As we went in through the darkened entrance she leaned against me, her one arm partially circling my waist. Upon reaching her door she emitted a tiny sigh, pulled my head down with both of her hands and kissed me eagerly on the mouth. Then she pressed the key into my hand and smiled.
“A writer needs experience,” she said impudently. “Let’s live it up a little bit.”
Once we were inside the apartment there were no further preliminaries. She removed her coat, dropped it across the back of the nearest chair and motioned for me to follow her into the bedroom.
I knew, from the way she stood in the middle of the bedroom and casually lifted the dress over her head, that this was old stuff with her. I wondered, as I shrugged out of my coat, how much bonus she picked up each week entertaining buyers. I decided, a few minutes later, that it was undoubtedly a considerable amount. She was violently clever in bed.
Every curve of her soft and willing body, every generous tremor which passed through it, seemed dedicated to delivering complete and lasting pleasure. Every demanding kiss, every moan and practiced movement, was designed to incite an overwhelming desire.
It was almost morning before I left her apartment.
I still did not know what had happened to Judith Call.
But I now knew where a woman lived.
A woman who cried because no one man would ever be enough.
4
DURING the following week I was tied up with a couple of rush-rush articles for Car Skill and I gave very little thought to either Judith Call or the project which I had undertaken for the Reverend Doctor Call. On Thursday, however, I delivered the completed articles to the Central Building and, not unexpectedly, Sam Terry insisted that I buy lunch. Sam frequently did this whenever he was forced to present me with a check. I guess it was sort of a game with him.
“That church thing wasn’t bad at all,” he admitted while we were lingering over our coffee. “Unusual. But you ought to get a different camera, Bill. Honestly. Those pics aren’t up to standard.”
Sam, who was in his forties and a family man, was one of those amateur photographers who thought that every shot had to be made with a two-hundred-dollar outfit. Once, after he’d given me a particularly hard time, I told him that I’d borrowed a Speed Graphic from a friend. He had been enthusiastic over the results. I hadn’t bothered to explain that I had used the Brownie anyway.
“Sam,” I said seriously, “just what do you know about dirty pictures?”
“That’s easy. I know I like some of them.”
“Why?”
He sipped his coffee and smiled at me.
“Who knows? Why get yourself all worked up about it?”
I told him, briefly, about my agreement to work with Dr. Call on the exposé. I also outlined what I had done so far, omitting, of course, the somewhat pleasant hours I had spent in Elsa Lang’s apartment.
“Well, you’ve got to do som
ething for a hundred and fifty a week,” Sam observed dryly. “That’s for sure.”
“Agreed.”
“Locating the minister’s daughter won’t account for much of it.”
I had phoned Elsa almost every evening but she hadn’t heard from Judith. Gracefully, I had declined another dinner date, saying that I was tied up with a lot of writing. I wondered if I’d try to think of an excuse the next time I spoke with her.
“The police might be a good bet,” Sam suggested. “And the Morning Star — they ran some articles on the subject a while ago. Why don’t you check with them?”
“I thought I would. I only wondered if you might know of someone connected with the operation.”
“Me?” Sam laughed. “Hell, I just look at the pictures. I don’t buy them and I don’t know who sells them.”
We spent another half an hour discussing future articles for Car Skill. When we parted at the corner of Fifth and Main I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me down to City Hall.
It was almost three before I got in to see the chief of the vice squad, a middle-aged lieutenant by the name of Murray. He was Irish and red-headed and seemed inclined to brush me off.
“Sure, there are dirty pictures around the city,” he admitted. “And prostitutes. A little bit of both pass through here everyday.”
“But where do the pictures come from?”
He looked at me across the top of the wide desk, his blue eyes sober and quite obviously impatient.
“If we knew,” he said, “there wouldn’t be any.”
I received little information from the lieutenant. The only actual arrest based on the sale of indecent pictures had taken place during the previous April, near one of the schools. The peddler, a man in his early fifties, had been given a sixty-day suspended sentence and, as far as the lieutenant knew, had departed from the city shortly thereafter. As for the store owners who handled the photos, no arrests had been made. A few had been warned and a considerable number of the pictures had been seized and destroyed. But nothing else had been done. Nothing.
“We’ve got more important things to keep us busy,” the lieutenant explained. “Take last night, for instance. There was a rape out in the East End section. A young nurse, she’s coming home from work, and this guy jumps her not a block away from one of our sub-stations. That’s the kind of thing we have to work on, Mr. Morgan. The pictures may be wrong and illegal, sure, but we have to take care of worst things first.”