The Nude Wore Blaсk

Chapter Nine

Even sammy spayed's problems had problems. His wife, for instance, had the problem of her number-nine pregnancy, a problem which resulted in renewed and vigorous nagging of Sammy to give up a profession which just wasn't lucrative enough to feed eight problem kids. The problem kids had problems, too, ranging from new shoes for the baby to braces needed on the teeth of the eldest-all problems adding up to the need for money. And then there was Hannah-another problem with a problem.

Hannah had become very possessive since going out on a limb for Sammy. She seemed to feel he owed her something. It wasn't too long before she spelled out the amount of the debt. "You're just too much of a man, lover," she told him. "I never thought I'd have sympathies in common with your wife, but here it is. I'm pregnant!"

When Sammy came to, she outlined what she expected him to do about it. Hannah had a gallant streak. She was all for having the baby. She didn't want to cause Sammy any trouble. Unless- Unless he failed to come up with the moola to make her pregnancy and subsequent childbirth tolerable. If he failed in that, then she promised faithfully to make a beeline to his wife and tell her all. So Hannah's problem also added up to the need for cash on Sammy's part.

But his biggest problem of all was Mrs. Rutherford. First she'd fired him, and now she refused to pay him one red cent for his efforts in her behalf. "Not only didn't you get any results," Llona had told him, "but because of you I found myself in all sorts of messy situations. You ought to pay me damages!"

"It's not fair," Sammy had whined. "If you'd given me a chance, I'd have found your man for you."

"So find him."

"I would if you hadn't fired me."

"If you find him, you're not fired. But if you don't, I'm damned if I'll pay you one red cent."

"That's a very unfair attitude, Mrs. Rutherford. After all- Mrs. Rutherford? Mrs. Rutherford?" It was no use. Llona had hung up on him.

It was against all Sammy's ethics to work without a retainer, and Llona's had been used up long ago. But when he'd sat in the office for three days without any new work coming in, with the pressure at home and the pressure from Hannah increasing, Sammy decided his only hope was to renew his search for Archer. He had no choice but to accept Llona's statement that if he found Archer she'd pay him.

For the second time, Sammy went down to the Birch-ville City Hall to check the marriage records. It was a slim chance, but perhaps he'd missed the marriage of some man named Mortimer on the date Llona had specified. He hadn't. According to the records, the only Mortimer married on that day was Mortimer Valentine. And Mortimer Valentine's cousin Arch had already been ruled out.

Then Sammy had a hunch. It was a slim chance, but he decided to check the records for marriages which had taken place on the Sunday prior to the one Llona had mentioned. When that hunch yielded no results, Sammy skipped to the Sunday following the one on which Llona had wed George Rutherford. Now he was luckier. He got his first break. The records showed that a Mortimer Quincy had married a girl named Agnes Pflugle on that date. Sammy jotted down the pertinent data and left the marriage bureau.

The next morning, bright and early, Sammy arrived at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Quincy. Mr. Mortimer Quincy was not at home; he was at work. Mrs. Mortimer Quincy, nee Agnes Pflugle, received Sammy in the accepted morning-wear of the suburban housewife: shapeless kimono, Martian hair-curlers, and no eyebrows.

"Agh!" Sammy gasped at the apparition which appeared in response to his ringing of the bell.

"Yes? What is it?" The skin of Agnes's face, doughy at best, now contracted pox from the sunlight streaming through the screen door.

"I'm from the census bureau." Sammy recovered himself and told her the cover story he'd made up on his way out to the Quincy residence. "We're checking some of our figures. Would you mind answering a few questions, Mrs. Quincy?"

"All right. But I was just going to take the curlers out and dry my hair. Why don't you come inside and we can talk while I'm doing that. Murder two sparrows with one pebble. Okay?"

"That will be fine." Sammy followed her through the house to the kitchen at the rear. She waved him vaguely toward the kitchen table, and he pulled out a chair and sat down there. Leaning his elbow in a pool of spilled breakfast coffee, Sammy started to ease into the "interview." "Now, Mrs. Quincy," he began. "Can you tell me-"

"Just a minute, huh? Let me get set up, and then we can start." Agnes Quincy climbed up on a stepladder and got a large box down from the top shelf of the dish closet. She opened the box and removed a contrivance that looked not unlike a centrifuge with tentacles. An electric wire and plug dangled from it. She bent over and inserted the plug in a socket at the baseboard of the wall. Then, with the wire trailing and unraveling behind her, she carried the apparatus to the table and sat down across from Sammy. She took the futuristically designed plastic bag with the elastic around the wide mouth of it and fit it over her forehead at the point where her eyebrows would have been if she'd had any eyebrows. Then she adjusted it so that it reached to the nape of her neck in back and encased every stray tendril of lank hair. The curlers pushing out the plasticized material gave it an appearance not unlike the craggy surface of the moon as it might have been photographed by an astronaut with a bad case of palsy. Attached to the top of this was something that looked like a vacuum hose. As Agnes tripped the switch, the hose roared into action, and the plastic atop her head billowed out like an empty bra cup caught in a gale while hanging on a washline. The sudden inflation made Agnes look both cerebral and other-worldly, an overall effect that lacked only a flying saucer hovering in the background to complete the picture. "I'm ready now. What do you want to know?" she said to Sammy.

"What?" He couldn't hear her over the jet-like roar of the hair-dryer.

"Fire away!" she shouted.

"Oh. Well, I just want some statistics," he answered back. "Now, your husband's job."

"I found that out right after we got married."

"I beg pardon?"

"That he was a slob."

"Who?"

"My husband. I'm agreeing with you. He's a slob."

"Not slob. Job!" Sammy shouted. "What's his job? What does he do for a living?"

"Oh! I wondered how you knew." She giggled. "He's a sock-tucker."

"He'sawhat?"

"A sock-tucker," she shouted. "He works in a factory

that manufactures men's socks. It's his job to tuck the toes in the heels and roll them before they're packed. His union classification is 'sock-tucker.' "

"Oh! I see. I thought you said-"

"Well, you've got your nerve!"

"Sorry! Sorry!" Sammy apologized hastily. "It's hard to hear you clearly with that thing going. Now, how long has your husband been tucking?"

"See here, Mister!"

"How long has he been working at his present occupation?" Sammy bellowed.

"Oh." She was mollified. "About four years."

"Did his job require much training?"

"Are you kidding? There isn't a cloud in the sky."

"Skip it!" Sammy sighed. "What about you? Did you work before you were married?"

"In a store."

"As a what?"

"Not 'as a'! 'In a'! In a store. That's where I worked before I was married. A lighting-fixture store. I sold brass."

"Your husband didn't mind about your-umm-premarital occupation?"

"Brass! BRASS!" she shouted. "BAAA-RRR-ASSS!"

"No need to be descriptive," Sammy told her. "I just want the facts, ma'am. Your working costume-or lack of it-is of no concern to this census."

Agnes shook her head with exasperation and gave up on the point. The tone for the interview had been set, and it continued in the same fashion for about twenty minutes. By then, Sammy felt that he had established a certain atmosphere of authenticity, and he got down to what he was really there to find out.

"Do you have any brothers and sisters?" He edged around to the question that would tell him what he wanted to know.

"I'm an only child. Daddy was a pastor." "Father illegitimate." Sammy made a note. "Cousins?" he asked. "Do you have any first cousins?"

"Two male, one female. All on my mother's side. None on Daddy's side. They were infertile."

"I don't care about pets," Sammy told her. He took a deep breath. "How about your husband?" he shouted. "Has he any brothers and sisters?"

"None."

"One? Which sex? Male or female?"

"Not one! None! Do you understand?"

"Perfectly. One sister in the Church." Sammy faked making another note. "Now," he got down to the nitty-gritty. "How about cousins? Does your husband have any cousins?"

"Dozens."

"That's right. Cousins. Does he have any?"

"He has dozens."

"Yes. I understand that. But how many?"

"Dozens," Agnes repeated wearily. "He has dozens of cousins!" She summoned up the energy to shout.

"Ah! I see. Dozens of cousins. Yes. Well, for the purposes of this survey, we're only interested in the cousins he may' have living in this district. How many males and how many females in the Birchville area?"

"Three males, six females."

"I'm sorry. Is it some sort of ailment that afflicts all the women in his family?"

"Not sick! Six! SIX! Six female cousins!"

"Ah. Well, now, could you just give me the names of the male cousins. For our records."

"Peter Porter, Abraham Lincoln, and-"

"I beg your pardon? That sounded like you said Abraham Lincoln," Sammy interrupted. "That damned noise-"

"I did. I did say Abraham Lincoln. That's his name. That's Mortimer's cousin's name. Abraham Lincoln. Nice

fellow, Abe. Wears a beard. Very active in civil rights. Hates the theatre, though. But then what can you expect from a rail-splitter? No culture."

"Of course." Sammy was getting a headache, and he'd only heard half of what she'd said and made very little sense out of that. "The third cousin?" he asked, pressing grittily onward. "What's his name?"

"Archer Hornsby. He's on Mortimer's mother's side. Mortimer hates him, though."

"Archer Hornsby!" Sammy had heard it through the roar of the dryer, and the instant satisfaction which filled him dispelled the headache. "Does he have a wife?" he asked.

"Does he ever! Riley should have it so good. But it isn't going to last."

"Wife!" Sammy shouted. "Not life! WIFE! Is he married?"

"Same thing." Agnes shrugged, which made her head look as if it was about to blast off, dryer and all. "He's been a bachelor living it up for years. But now he's finally been hooked. He's getting married on Sunday. Surprised everybody. Very sudden. Mortimer says the bride-to-be's probably a wee bit pregnant, but he could be just being spiteful. Still, it's hard to think of any other reason why Archer would get married. Two more days of freedom, and that's it for poor Archer."

"Can you give me his address?" Sammy asked. The trail was too hot now to bother with being roundabout.

Agnes looked at him curiously, but she complied. Mr. Spayed immediately got up, bid her goodbye, and headed for the door. "I hope you make Venus," he called over his shoulder as she turned the hair-dryer up a notch and it did indeed appear to be going into orbit.

"I haven't got any, either," she called back. "But I was born without one. What happened to yours?"

Sammy closed the door behind him without bothering o answer. He made a beeline for the nearest drug store arid called Llona Rutherford. When he told her what he'd uncovered, he extracted a promise from her that if this was the right man she'd pay his bill with a generous bonus besides.

As soon as she'd hung up on Sammy, Llona raced for the phone book and looked up the number of Archer Hornsby. The address beside his name in the directory checked out with the one Sammy had given her. She dialed the phone number with eager, trembling fingers.

It rang a long time, but there was no answer. She waited a half-hour and tried it again. Still no answer. Llona called the number every hour on the hour all through the day and far into the night, but it was in vain. Archer Hornsby wasn't there to respond to the ringing phone.

He wasn't there the next day, which was Saturday, either. The reason he wasn't there was that Archer had gone out of town for one last fling as a bachelor before getting married. It wasn't until early Sunday morning, the day of the wedding, that he finally returned to his apartment. When he did, he showered and shaved quickly and put on the dress suit he was wearing for the wedding. Just as he closed the door behind him, the phone started ringing again. Archer glanced at his watch, saw that he was short of time, and decided against going back inside to answer it.

On the other end of the unanswered wire, Llona was frantic. She knew from what Sammy Spayed had told her that the wedding was due to take place in about two hours. She simply had to see Archer before he took a step that would be irretrievable for both of them. When her latest attempt to reach him failed, she decided to go to the home of the bride where the wedding was to take place and crash the ceremony. She had to speak with Archer before it was too late.

As she drove there, the traffic was infuriating. "I'll never make it in time," Llona moaned to herself. And when she finally arrived, she couldn't tell whether she had or not. The place was a madhouse, a champagne-pouring confusion of milling guests packed into the too-small house like underprivileged sardines.

Llona fought her way through the crowd, trying in vain to pick out Archer. Finally she collared one of the hired waiters long enough to ask him if he knew where she might find the groom.

"Upstairs somewhere." He gestured vaguely.

Llona struggled through the people gathered on the staircase and made her way to the upper floor. She stopped an older woman who looked harassed and was wearing a corsage and repeated her question.

"I've got all I can do keeping track of the bride," the woman told her. "Maybe he's in there." She pointed to a closed door. "That's the room the men were using for changing."

Llona knocked at the door the woman had indicated. There was no answer. She knocked again and then pushed it open. The room was empty. A man's suit, which looked new and suitable for traveling, was laid out neatly on the bed. Llona tried hard to recall Archer and judge if the suit was his size. Just as she'd made up her mind that it was very possible, she heard the sounds of two men's voices just outside the door by which she'd entered. Her heart skipped a beat as she recognized one of the voices as Archer's. Hearing it again, she could have no doubt about it!

But Llona wanted to see him alone. It wouldn't be any good if some other man was present. As the doorknob turned, she decided to hide in the closet in the hope that the other man would leave and she could confront Archer privately. Llona closed the closet door behind her just as the two men entered the room. She knelt down and peered through the keyhole, eager for even the slightest glimpse of the face of the man she'd dreamed about and yearned to see again for such a long time.

The keyhole revealed one of the men sitting on the edge of the bed. His face was visible, but he wasn't Archer. The other man had his back to the closet. He was taking off the dress suit he was wearing. He threw the jacket carelessly on the bed, pulled off the pants, and unbuttoned his shirt. It was only after he'd thrown the shirt beside the jacket on the bed that he turned around and Llona saw his face. Standing there in jockey shorts, shoes and socks, was the Archer of her fondest memories. A feeling of faintness swept over Llona, seeing him standing there like that, looking so virile, so manly, so desirable.

Now the other man made some remark to Archer and got to his feet. They shook hands, and the other man left. When the door closed behind him, Archer sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes and socks. Watching him, Llona wanted to burst out of the closet and throw herself into his arms. But her courage failed her. Suppose he rejected her? She'd die! She'd simply die!

Barefoot now, Archer stood up. He pulled off his jockey shorts and stood facing the closet absent-mindedly. At the sight of his naked body, Llona grabbed onto the doorknob for support. It opened, and she came tumbling out.

"You!" Archer's jaw dropped, and he stared at her in amazement.

"Archer!" she panted.

"You!" he repeated himself, memory making him pant in return.

He held out his hand to help her up. She clutched it to her breast, unable to speak. He knelt beside her. She fell back into his arms. His desire grew to a visual fact. Her desire made her reach for it with hungry fingers. He unbuttoned her blouse. She pushed off her skirt. He tore off her bra and buried his face between her lush breasts. She wriggled free of her panties. He kissed her lips. She kissed back avidly. His hand traveled down the length of her body. Her hand guided it to the damp V of her passion. He rose up and clambered over her. She parted her thighs and received him eagerly. The scene dissolved for both of them as they were caught up once again in a journey of ecstasy which finally left them both lying tired and sated and happy on Cloud Nine.

Their descent from the cloud, however, was somewhat awkward. "Long time no see," Archer said lamely. "How've you been?"

"I've missed you," Llona sighed.

"And your husband?" he asked delicately. "How is he?"

"Dead," Llona told him.

"Too bad. But give him a chance. Maybe he'll liven up."

"You don't understand. He's really dead. He dropped dead on our wedding night."

"What a way to go," Archer said admiringly. "So he's really dead, hey?" he added. "Well, I'm not one to take pleasure in someone else's misfortune, but-"

"Oh, Archer! Then you do feel the way I do! You do want me as much as I want you! I was so afraid it might be one-sided."

"Not on your life. I haven't been able to get you out of my mind since that day. The only reason I made myself keep away from you was that you were married. If I'd only known-"

"But it's not too late, Archer. We've found each other now. I'm free. You can marry me-if you want to, that is."

"I do want to," he said miserably, "but I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because I just got married. Only fifteen minutes ago. That's when the ceremony ended. I just got married."

"You're married," Llona groaned. "Then I'm too late. You really are married?" she asked, as if begging him to tell her he was only fooling.

"I really am married," he said sadly. "Archer," she sobbed, "you sure know how to hurt a fella!"