{ASS} New: "Double Cross" by DG [7/9] (Erotic detective story)

[diony...@hotmail.com]

"Double Cross"

A Frank Stern Mystery

(c) 1999 by DG (diony...@hotmail.com)

Chapter Seven
-------------

I woke up the next morning to the sight of Tina Callahan doing
situps on a padded incline bench that was tilted up like the roof of a
Swiss chalet. Sweat trickled down her neck and chest. Whatever body
fat she possessed was covered by two small pieces of black lycra. She
was counting off the situps with explosive little grunts, which must
be what woke me up.
"When's the big title fight, champ?"
She smiled through gritted teeth and did four more situps, then
unhooked her ankles and slid to the floor. Her abdominal muscles,
pumped full of blood, stood out like a relief map of the sea floor.
"Would you believe I used to be an aerobics instructor?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorta addicted to exercise. How about you?"
"Last night was more exercise than I've had in months." I sat
up, realizing as I did so that I was naked. My head felt fuzzy and
thick.
"Last night was fun," she said. "I'm going to grab a shower and
then I've got to get to work. Help yourself to some breakfast." She
got to her feet and went into the bathroom, stripping off her bra top
as she walked.
I found my shorts and put them on, then went into the kitchen and
snooped around with out much hope. There was orange juice and skim
milk and four different kinds of bran cereal. No eggs or bacon or
donuts. I poured myself a bowl of flakes and sat down at her little
dinette to crunch away.
In less time than I would have thought possible, she appeared in
the doorway, dressed for work in jeans and a blouse.
"Just shut the door behind you when you leave," she said.
"What about your car?"
"I jogged over and got it this morning while you were asleep."
"Ah."
"Hey, be careful in San Diego, OK? Lemme know if you find the
tapes."
"OK. Have a nice day at work, honey."
She smiled and went out the door. I heard her Accord start up
and drive away. I'm sure I wasn't looking very kissable at the
moment, but it would have been a nice gesture.
Her cat was staring at me with undisguised hostility, back arched
and fur standing up. I can take a hint. I put on the rest of my
clothes, made Tina's bed, and then headed back home. It was Saturday,
so I took a long shower and then put on a big pot of coffee. After
the third cup, I started cheering up. I started thinking of reasons
why Tina and I were incompatible, and came up with ten off the top of
my head. Then I tried to think of good reasons for us to get
together, and couldn't think of half that many. I decided it was time
to put her out of my mind, and start doing some detecting.
I gathered up all the equipment and supplies I thought I might
need, loaded them into my van, and headed south toward San Diego.
The late George Cahn's house turned out to be a modern,
sprawling, structure that would probably be described in a real estate
listing as a ranch. It was very white and very angular, and had a U-
shaped footprint that surrounded a big pool. It wasn't exactly ugly,
but it seemed a bit tacky and outdated, like it was trying too hard to
be cool. You sort of expected to see Don Johnson leaning against a
palm tree, wearing white shoes and Ray-bans.
I parked on the street across from the open front gate and took a
closer look. The elaborate landscaping looked neglected, particularly
the lawn, which had no doubt been trampled over by hordes of heavy-
footed cops. There were leaves and bugs floating in the pool. There
weren't any obvious signs that it was a crime scene, just a notice
taped to the front door which I couldn't read from the street. I
supposed the physical evidence teams had finished up and the yellow
tape had been taken down. I wondered if prospective buyers would be
aware that the previous owner had been killed inside the house.
Probably. In fact, it might increase the asking price.
I climbed over the seat into the back of the van and put on a
pair of white coveralls and a light blue cap. Then I parked a little
ways farther up the street and walked back, turning up Cahn's driveway
with a confident heads-up stride, like I had every right to be there.
There didn't seem to be anyone else around, but you never know when
someone might be watching from afar. Someone like me, for instance.
There was a long-handled skimmer mounted on brackets near the
pool, and I grabbed it and went to work. For ten or fifteen minutes I
idly skimmed the pool while I studied the house and surrounding yard
and got comfortable with the environment. There was plenty of privacy
- the neighboring houses were blocked by tall hedges and by the U-
shape of the house itself. Carrying the skimmer, I walked along the
inside perimeter of the house, looking for possible ways to get in.
The back door was locked, and so was the sliding glass door near the
pool. The front door I knew would be locked, and I didn't want to
expose myself to the street. I concentrated on the windows.
Unfortunately they were the kind that swing open from the top about a
foot, and that's it. Nobody opens windows in southern California
except maybe to clean them.
No basement windows to wriggle into, no secluded doors with
substandard locks. The place might be tacky, but it was secure. As I
walked past the sliding glass door a second time, I realized that
something hadn't felt quite right when I had tried it. A locked
sliding door will generally slide a fraction of an inch before
stopping, but this one hadn't budged. I tried it again, giving it a
harder yank, and it made a loud popping sound and clattered halfway
open. Not locked, just a tight seal.
Startled, I slid it shut again and looked around guiltily. My
plan had been to scout out possible points of entry for when I came
back under cover of darkness. But plans were made to be changed. I
put down the skimmer, popped the door open again, slipped inside, and
shut it behind me.
I was standing in a little tiled area which separated the kitchen
from the living room. The house was completely silent - no
refrigerator or air conditioner sounds to provide the usual background
noise. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see that all the
exposed surfaces were coated with the bluish-gray smudging of
fingerprint powder. Apparently the police had straightened the place
up as they investigated, because there was little sign of a violent
search.
I took a few deep breaths to settle myself, and then I took a
pair of thin plastic gloves out of my pocket and pulled them on.
There are several hiding places people use so often that they are
almost cliches to those of us in the business of finding things,
probably because everyone reads the same novels and watches the same
movies. In the kitchen, people hide things inside the stove and
refrigerator, and inside canisters of flour and sugar. I opened the
fridge and saw that it had been cleaned out so that the food wouldn't
spoil. I found a few canisters, but they had already been emptied
out.
The pattern continued through the rest of the first floor - every
hiding place I checked showed signs of being previously searched.
Lamps had been opened, light fixtures had been pulled out to look
above the ceiling, toilet tanks had been pried open and checked,
cushions had been unzipped or sliced open. I got the distinct
impression that I was wasting my time.
While I was performing my fruitless search, I did notice a couple
interesting things. The location of the murder, for one thing. In a
small first-floor bedroom that appeared to be a guest suite, there was
a bed with a blood-covered mattress. Every square inch of hard
surface in the room had powder on it, and the smell of forensic
chemicals lingered in the air. From the amount of blood, I imagined
that the bullet had ripped open an artery, and that George Cahn had
"bled out," as the paramedics call it. In any case, he hadn't bought
it in the master bedroom - that would help the real estate agents.
The other interesting thing was the photographs. The walls were
filled with framed snapshots of Cahn and his friends, most taken right
here at his home. The standard pose was Cahn standing with his right
arm draped chummily around another person. If it was a man, his hand
was on the guy's shoulder, and Cahn wore a serious look. If it was a
woman, he had his hand on her ass or cupping her tit, and he had a
shit-eating grin on his face. Cahn himself was a well-tanned, bald
man of medium height and lean build, with a big nose and a neatly-
trimmed gray beard. Not bad looking for a guy in his fifties.
A wild party seemed to be going on at all times - in the
background of every picture you could see people frolicking in the
pool, crowding into the hot tub, or milling around half-naked in the
big living room. There seemed to be more women than men, and the
women were all dressed like sluts, if they were dressed at all.
Claire's comments about Cahn's party lifestyle certainly seemed to be
on target.
I recognized a few of the women as porn actresses, which was no
surprise. What did surprise me was that I recognized some of the men
as well. It appeared that Cahn's circle of friends extended outside
the adult film industry to mainstream Hollywood. Burt Reynolds and
George Hamilton were there. Some of the younger men looked familiar
as well, but their names didn't come to me. They all looked to be
enjoying themselves, and why not? I'm sure I would have enjoyed
Cahn's parties too.
I found the stairs and went up to the second floor. Up here the
place was less of a mess. It seemed that the police had focused on
the first floor. Maybe the killer hadn't tossed the second floor, so
the police hadn't bothered with the forensics. They had continued
their search, of course. Every room bore the unmistakable signs of a
thorough going-over.
The long hall that connected the bedrooms was lined with
pictures, but a few of them were missing. Official police souvenirs,
or maybe the people in them were considered potential suspects. I
spotted a picture of Cahn with his arm around Edward Burke, and I had
to laugh. Burke was wearing a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the waist,
and his trademark bushy gray eyebrows looked even more unkempt than
usual. The nubile blonde he was with might have been a third of his
age. I wondered if Barry Rank knew that his good buddy liked to party
with porn stars.
The master bedroom was at the end of the hall, and it was huge.
A wall of windows overlooked the pool. The other wall was lined with
floor-to-ceiling cabinets made of polished, expensive-looking wood.
In the middle of the room was a big, round bed. The ceiling was
mirrored and had track lighting that could no doubt be adjusted to
suit any mood. I could see where the mirrors and fixtures had been
removed and then sloppily replaced by the police search team.
I went over to the windows and looked out. From here Cahn could
have kept an eye on the action in the pool and hot tub while he
entertained his choice of the female guests. They would have been
eager to sleep with him, of course. Oversexed girls in their late
teens and early twenties, trying to make it in a competitive business
- a powerful producer like Cahn probably had to fight them off with a
stick.
I found myself daydreaming, imagining a group sex scene in the
hot tub below me. Three or four guys sitting around the edge with
their legs in the water, holding drinks in their hands and laughing
while wet-haired, big-breasted girls in the tub sucked on their cocks.
There would be more action in and around the pool, maybe even a
lesbian show on the diving board. George Cahn would have stood where
I was standing right now, making sure everyone was having a good time
before he dove back into the tangle of sweaty flesh waiting for him on
the circular bed. Maybe my imagination is overactive, but I didn't
think I was stretching too far.
It was starting to get dark out, so I dropped the aluminum blinds
on all the windows and pulled the heavy curtains across. Then I
turned on a few lights and sat down on the bed to think. The police
had been here first and had searched the place carefully. But I had
an advantage over the police: I knew what I was looking for. If Cahn
had hidden the tapes of Claire Ingleford, the police would have found
them, and they would have been impounded on the assumption that they
had been hidden for a reason.
But what if the tapes weren't hidden? I opened up the cabinets
along the wall. As, I suspected, they contained a home-theater system
with a wide-screen TV, along with a large collection of laser disks,
music CDs, and videocassettes.
Cahn had about forty movies on tape, everything from porn to
action movies to comedies. I remembered reading a novel where a guy
had hidden a tape by recording it onto a commercial cassette, leaving
some of the original movie at the beginning. Maybe Cahn had done the
same thing. As I scanned the titles again, I felt my pulse quicken.
Would Cahn really want to own a copy of "Weekend at Bernies," or
"Rocky IV"? Would anyone?
I turned on the TV and VCR and figured out how to fast-forward
through a tape so the picture still appeared on screen. It took about
five minutes to go through one tape. I selected them from the shelf
at random, tossing them on the floor afterwards to keep from
repeating.
An hour or so later, after the tenth movie, I had a headache from
looking at the flickering fast-forward picture and I was sure I wasn't
going to find anything this way. Apparently Cahn really did have bad
taste in movies. I rubbed my eyes and went into the master bathroom,
a luxurious, masculine enclave tiled in black marble. I found some
Nuprin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed a couple. Then I went
over to the toilet to take a leak.
Cahn had hung a framed picture over the toilet, and I studied it
as I relieved myself. This one had been taken here in the bedroom -
on the bed, in fact. Cahn was sitting between a pair of top-heavy
blondes who were virtually indistinguishable due to a thick layer of
identically-applied makeup. They were wearing matching pink bikinis,
and each girl had pulled her bikini top aside to reveal one immense,
globular breast. The picture was signed, with the inscription "You're
the best, Georgie! Love, the San Diego Bikini Team."
Then I noticed something odd about the picture. I leaned forward
to get a closer look, almost pissing outside the bowl. The bed seemed
to be several inches higher than it was right now, and the bottom of
the base was black instead of the light-colored wood that I
remembered.
I finished up quickly and went back to the bed. There was no
black on the outside, just wood all the way down to the carpet. I
felt around the base, pulling away the thick shag. There was a tight-
fitting rim through which the bed could apparently be raised or
lowered. But how?
It took me several minutes to figure it out. There was a
decorative wooden box next to the TV that must have had a dozen
remotes in it. One of them was a Sony, which struck me as odd because
Cahn's home theater system didn't have any Sony components. I pressed
a few buttons, and suddenly there was a low pitched whine and the bed
levitated out of the floor and started rotating. I pressed more
buttons, trying to get it to stop, but succeeded only in dimmed the
lights and making it spin faster. When the bed started to vibrate,
accompanied by an obscene, undulating humming noise, I sat down on the
floor and had a good laugh.
Eventually I managed to get the multi-talented bed to heel, and I
saw there was a wide drawer located at what would be the foot of a
normal bed. It opened easily, revealing a jumbled assortment of
condoms, vibrators, latex gloves, lubricants, and other brightly
colored plastic objects whose use wasn't immediately apparent. What
it didn't contain was videotapes, but my disappointment was brief
because I quickly noticed that the drawer was much shallower that it
needed to be. Feeling around inside, I located one of the stops which
kept the drawer from rolling out completely. I worked at it, and
voila - the drawer separated completely from the bed. I dug my little
maglight out of my pool-boy coveralls and shone it into the hole in
the bed. There was a cardboard box behind the drawer.
I slid it out and sure enough, it was full of tapes.
"So that's where you've been hiding, you little bastards," I
said.
There were sixteen of them, stacked in two rows of eight, all in
generic plastic cases. When I found cassettes with the typewritten
titles "Samantha's Diary," and "Double Cross," each labeled "Pre-
production copy - not for resale," it was almost an anticlimax. When
you finally hit paydirt, you know it. The other tapes had handwritten
labels, each containing a list of names, dates, and cryptic notations.
I popped "Samantha's Diary," into the VCR. The opening credits
hadn't been added yet, so the tape jumped right into the opening
scene. I fast-forwarded until I spotted Claire. She didn't appear
until more than halfway through the movie, giving a guy a blowjob in
the front seat of a car. I popped out the tape and put in "Double
Cross." The opening scene showed Claire Ingleford sitting at a desk
in her underwear, writing a letter with an nasty smirk on her face.
I sat down on the bed to watch. Claire's hair was a lighter
shade of brown, and longer, and her face had the soft, unlined
contours of a girl just out of her teens, but she was clearly
recognizable. She finished the letter, sealing the envelope with a
sensuous stroke of her tongue, and then she leaned back in the swivel
chair and pushed her hand down into the front of her panties and
started masturbating.
It startled me, which it shouldn't have since I knew what kind of
movie it was. I realized that the sound effects hadn't been added
yet, and so there was no pulsing crescendo of bad synthesizer music to
cue in the sex.
It hit me all of a sudden that I was alone in a room watching a
hot porno tape starring a famous and sexy woman who had promised me a
private reward if I delivered the movie to her. The look on my face
can't have been flattering. I stripped off my clothes, leaving just
my shirt, and grabbed a tube of lubricant from the handy selection in
the drawer.
On screen, Claire had taken her panties off and was digging into
her snatch with both hands. She was groaning and gyrating her hips on
the chair like a woman possessed, snapping her mane of hair around. I
could see why she had been on the brink of making it big in the jizz
biz - she was a natural. Her raw sexuality reached out through the
lens like few women I've seen.
The scene changed abruptly, to my disappointment. This time it
was an office, and I was treated with a dose of the stiff acting and
dialogue that is the bane of the genre. I fast-forwarded until Claire
appeared again. This time she was dressed conservatively in a dark
business suit, and I gathered that this was actually a different
character - Claire was playing twin sisters, one wild, the other
straightlaced. The movie seemed to have more plot than was really
good for it, and I hit fast forward again until I saw Claire on her
knees sucking cock, her beautiful tits swaying in counterpoint to the
bobbing of her head.
Did I mention that she was a natural? The camera closed in on
her face as she worked over the guy's thick meat, and I squirted on
some lube and started stroking my own cock as I watched her moist lips
traveling up and down the guy's shaft, her eyes rolling back in her
head with pleasure as if her clit was located at the back of her
throat.
It wasn't long before I was ready to come. I briefly
contemplated pulling down my balls to make myself last longer, but
decided that would be pointless and decadent. So as not to leave any
genetic evidence on the carpet, I paused briefly to put on a condom.
On screen, the guy was holding Claire's legs up in the air as he
pounded away furiously at her snatch. When he pulled out and sprayed
a generous, sticky load all over Claire's breasts, I was right there
with him, wishing it was me.
The afterglow faded fast, and I had a sudden desire to get the
hell out of there. I cleaned up in the bathroom, and then I put
everything back where I had found it, except for the box of tapes.
When the bedroom looked pretty much the same way I found it, I picked
up the box, went back downstairs, and slipped out through the sliding
glass door into the humid night air. I stood in the shadows for a few
minutes, watching my van to see if it had attracted any interest. The
neighborhood was as quiet as death - everyone was sealed into their
air-conditioned habitats. I put the box in the back of the van and
drove off, victorious for once.
When I got back to my apartment I put the box of tapes in my safe
and called Claire Ingleford. The phone rang several times, and when
she answered her voice was groggy from sleep.
"What?"
"Hi Claire - it's Frank Stern. I guess I woke you, huh?"
"What time is it?"
"Uh, almost midnight. Sorry, I didn't figure you were the early-
to-bed type."
"I've got to be on the set getting my hair and makeup done by six
a.m. What's going on?"
"I found the tapes."
"Your kidding!" I heard some shuffling and thumping, and the
sound of a lamp being switched on. "Where were they?"
"In a hidden compartment below his bed. Took me forever to find
them."
"Shit. I didn't think to... good for you, Stern. Which ones are
they?"
"The titles are 'Double Cross' and 'Samantha's Diary'."
"Those are the ones! Did you watch them?"
"Um, just a little. Just to make sure you were in them, that
they were the right ones."
She chuckled. "Of course. So what did you think?"
"I think you would have ended up famous even if you had stayed in
porn."
She laughed. "Infamous, you mean. But thanks. God, this is
great...can you bring them to my house tomorrow night? I'll be back
by about eight."
"You going to have the cash ready?"
"Of course."
"OK, I'll be there around nine."

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requires the written permission of the author.*

Comments are welcome.

DG
diony...@hotmail.com
DG's Story Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm

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