Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 1, 1960
- Автор: Бучер Энтони, Хантер Эван
- Год: 1960
- Язык: английский
- Год: Pocket Books
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 1, 1960». Краткое содержание книги:
The sun was bright, the air clear, the sand under our bare feet voluptuously warm. The sea was, as always, bluer than I remembered it, and the combers boomed a few yards away, white jets of foam slashing the beach like fangs.
And the girl was Robbie.
Roberta Greta Ducharme. Twenty-four years old, but wiser than twenty-four, and in her blood and bone the best of Mexico, Sweden, and France. Tall enough, with red-burned chestnut hair, sweet lips, gray eyes like warm, solid smoke. And a body — indescribable. I live and work in Hollywood, I’ve seen a lot of them, but Robbie stood in the sun and left most of the rest in the shade. The measurements were there, splendidly there, but they were statistics that merely whispered; her body did the shouting.
Robbie, at the moment, was very much full of hell.
I was trying out a big Zoomar telescopic lens on my new Bell-and-Howell movie camera, holding on Robbie while she danced and pranced. She posed, flew around, wiggled a little. The word for it was: Sensational.
“Shell,” Robbie called to me.
“Yeah?”
“Let me take a picture — I haven’t any of you yet.”
“Ah, what a tragic—”
“Really. You can give it to me when it’s developed, so I’ll have proof.”
“Proof?”
“Uh-huh. If I tell my girl friends I went out with a devilish private detective six feet two inches tall and a couple hundred and — how many pounds?”
“Five or six. Wearing my trunks.”
“With that fabulous tan and crazy white hair sticking up on your head and those white eyebrows—”
“Now, that’s enough. I’m not sure you’re going at this in the true spirit of—”
“—and all those muscles and all, they wouldn’t believe me. But if I have a movie to show them...” She frowned, very prettily. “They may still not believe me.”
I grabbed her, picked her up, and ran toward the water, but she squealed and wriggled so frantically, yelling, “My hair, my hair! You’ll get my hair wet!” that I stopped before she got inundated, turned, and carried her up the beach again. She rested limp in my arms, let her head fall back, thick glossy hair brushing my thigh. She sighed, then said, “Fun, Shell. Very fun.”
“True, Robbie. Very fun.”
It was. I’d talked to Robbie several times before. She was a model, part-time actress, part-time cocktail waitress. I’d met her during a part-time-cocktail-waitress period and we’d had fun yacking, but this was our first date, first outing together. The beach had been the right choice for sure. We were completely alone here, sea on one side, half circle of cliffs on the other. The only ways in or out were along narrow paths down the cliffs, one at each end of the beach.
I put Robbie on her feet again and she winked at me, tossed her hair, and pranced away like a skittish colt. I got the camera focused on her, took a long shot, and then pushed the little lever that moved the adjustable lens, to bring her up close in the view finder, and zoom, right up there! It was wonderful, and got even better. These were shots I would look at when I got old, to get me young again.
“Shell.” Robbie called, gyrating around, “I never told you.”
“Told me what?”
“Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had a suppressed desire to be a striptease dancer.”
“Aha, so that’s what you’re doing out there?” I lowered the camera and grinned at her.
I thought something moved against the skyline a couple of hundred yards away, up at the top of the cliffs. I glanced over there but nothing was in sight. A comber hit jagged rocks at the cliff’s base and spurted thick feathers of spray high above them. Maybe that was what I’d seen.
Robbie laughed. “I’m just getting loosened up now. But really — I’m serious. Just once, just once, I’d love to really do it! It’s crazy, I know—”
“No, it’s not.”
“—but I almost have to fight it sometimes.”
“Robbie, dear, don’t fight it. Don’t you know suppression can warp your tender little brain all out of whack? You can get whacky, you can get... complexes and all that jazz.”
“Some of those girls must have fun when they slither out on the stage” — she made a little slithering motion — “and sway and wiggle around” — she made some little swaying and wiggling-around motions — “and then... get all wound up... and let... go — Oh, what am I saying? I almost got carried away.”
“Don’t stop, don’t stop. You were just going good there.”
She laughed again. “I’ve seen them on the stage in the lights. The men just whoop and holler, you know it?”
“Yeah, I know it. In fact—”
“And they actually whistle when the girl glides around and then stops and... gets all wound up... and lets... go— Oh, there I go again.”
“Drat it, you didn’t go. Robbie, you can’t just... are you going to leave everything so... all half-finished... and just dangling like—”
“I tell you what I’ll do, Shell.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll do it. Do a strip-tease, right here, I mean, just like on a stage. And you can make a movie of it — if you promise never to show it to anybody but me.”
“I promise!”
“You won’t think I’m awful—”
“What a ridiculous—”
“—or a brazen hussy, or bad or anything?”
“No, no—”
“I just feel so free...”
“Free...”
“... so good...”
“... good...”
She’d been prancing about, but now she stopped and stared at me, head slightly lowered, smiling, white teeth pressed together. “I’ll really do it — unless you stop me.”
Well, you know it: I sure as hell didn’t stop her. Still smiling, she began to dance again. Slowly at first, then a little more wildly.
“Make the movie!” she said, laughing.
I shot a few feet of film as she spun and arched and whirled. I thought something moved again on the edge of that cliff, but just then Robbie stretched both hands behind her back, reaching for the bowknot of the bikini bra. And I forgot to look away. The movement made her breasts seem to swell, burst forward against the cloth as if they were going to thrust completely through it
She pulled at the strings of the bra and it loosened, started to fall. But she brought one arm forward quickly, pressed her hand against the middle of the cloth, held it there while the outer edges fell, half-baring the white roundness of her breasts.
Well, it began feeling as if my blood were vulcanizing the lining of my veins, as if I were cooking from the inside out. I could actually feel the increased heat of my skin. Because there was something unique about this Robbie, a kind of wild witchcraft or mesmerism, an electrical atmosphere all around her, impalpable and invisible but there just the same.
It was like getting hit with an invisible sap, almost as if, when she stood twenty feet away and I looked at her, there was really no distance between us. As if she moved in some fourth dimension of her own — and that fourth dimension was sex. It wasn’t anything conscious or purposeful; it was just there, all the time, and you couldn’t ever be completely unaware of it even when she was sitting still. And she was not sitting still, she was moving, swaying almost lasciviously now, the bra sliding, slipping.
And I guess I slipped, mentally, into some kind of different dimension myself. Because there were men on the brink of the cliff now, two of them clearly outlined against the sky. A tall man and a short one, the shorter man slumped, held almost erect by the other. Part of my mind noted those other movements, registered them all, but none of it penetrated more than a few cells deep into my brain, not at first.