The pussycat transplant

“Uh, hello.” Penny looked at her blankly.

She reached up with both hands and parted the hair concealing her face. “It’s me. Sonia,” she told Penny. “Well, why do you look so funny? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Sure. Sure.” Penny reached down and helped her to her feet. “Uh, you’ve got fried rice in your hair,” Penny noticed.

“Damn!” The girl combed her long, straight hair out with her fingers impatiently. “What are you doing here anyway? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming downtown tonight?”

“Uh, there’s a piece of egg roll behind your left ear.” Penny extricated it deliberately, using the maneuver as an excuse to dodge the question.

“Come on, let’s find a table,” Sonia suggested.

“All right.” Penny followed her. “Uh, you’re stepping on that girl’s stomach.”

“I tripped over the guitar. Why the hell do they have to sit on the floor anyway? And why is it so dark here?”

“It’s not that dark!” Penny pointed out, catching her elbow just in time to keep her from sprawling across a couple necking in a corner. “I don’t think we should go this way-—” Penny started to add.

Too late!

“Right up here, kids!” A hand reached out and pulled Sonia up on a makeshift stage. Penny, holding her other arm was propelled along with her. “And now for our next psychodrama! Completely spontaneous and unrehearsed. Is it life, or is it improvisation? Or are they the same thing? All right, kids, you’re on!”

A spotlight blinded Penny. The couple was alone up on the stage now, all eyes focused on them. “What’ll we do?” Penny hissed.

“Psychodrama,” Sonia hissed back. “Come on. Forget your inhibitions. Let’s go! Release your aggressions!” She hauled off and slammed Penny across the face. “Now What have you got to say to that?” she projected loudly.

“I’m against violence!” Penny’s eyes were tearing.

Sonia slapped Penny again.

“But in your case, I’ll make an exception!” Penny slugged her back.

The psychodrama ‘began . . .

CHAPTER NINE

Psychodrarna . . .

“You struck me!” Sonia protested, whimpering.

“You hit me first,” Penny reminded her.

“That’s no excuse. I’m old enough to be your mother.” Sonia’s voice was a croak now. She’d decided upon a characterization, and she seemed to transform herself physically to conform to it. Her features crumpled and her jaw sagged. She bent her hack so that her breasts seemed to lose their shape. She wet her finger and wiped the eyeliner from her lids and then used it to etch in lines in her face. She twisted her long hair into a shapeless knot at the hack. Then she hobbled across the stage and sank into a rocking chair standing there. “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she repeated in a voice that was even more quavery now.

Penny fell in with the plot. As Sonia conveyed the illusion of age, Penny seemed almost to become younger, to take on an adolescent slouch and shuffle, a teen-age insolence, the classic cool of a high-school dropout. “‘Mother hell! You’re old enough to be my grandmother!” Penny told Sonia.

“I shouldn’t be here like this with you.” Sonia pushed action along. “I never should have agreed to drive you home.”

“That’s a pretty jazzy Aston-Martin you’re pushing. What’s an old bag like you doing with a hot-rod like that?”

“It was a graduation present,” Sonia croaked. “My granddaughter gave it to me at the Senior Citizens’ commencement exercises.” She sighed. “It’s a symbol. It stands for the way youth corrupts age. Youth always corrupts age.”

“That’s ’cause you wise-ass fogeys refuse to conform to the society around you.”

“My last birthday my granddaughter gave me a gift certificate to Forest Lawn,” Sonia whined.

“How old were you?”

“Ninety—seven.”

“Well, that was pretty thoughtful of her. It might come in handy. You could show some appreciation. That’s the trouble with you oldsters, you think everything’s coming to you.” Penny eyed her. “Ninety-seven, hey? That’s a good age. That kind of age really turns me on. Yessir, old biddies really do turn me on.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“I’m lonely. Did you know I was a junkie?”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Sonia wheezed. “It’s none of my business.” She creaked to her feet.

“Sit down. What do you drink?”

“I’m leaving now.”

“You can’t. I’m afraid to be alone. My pusher won’t be home for hours. Sit down. You can’t leave me alone.”

“I really shouldn’t—” Sonia sat down.

“That’s better. Now, what do you drink?”

“Gin and Geritol.”

“Right.” Penny mixed two imaginary drinks and pantomimed handing Sonia one and sipping the other. “Do you dig me?” Penny asked.

“What are you leading up to?” Sonia trembled with age.

“What do you think?” Penny slid a hand up her varicosed leg.

“You are trying to seduce me!”

“Don’t be silly.” Penny pulled down her old-fashioned bloomers.

“Aren’t you?” Sonia’s voice trembled with age and doubt.

“The thought hadn’t occurred to me.” Penny’s hand tangled in her gray pubic hairs.

“Aren’t you?” Sonia was more doubtful.

“Of course not.” Penny kissed her hysterectomy scar. “I’m sorry.” Sonia sounded senile and contrite. “I never should have said that. That was a terrible thing to say. I apologize. What are you doing now?”

“Just trying to see if they left anything after the operation.”

“It was so long ago, I don’t remember.” Sonia sucked the last of her drink through parchment lips. “I shouldn’t be here like this with you,” she said. “What if somebody found out? It would look awful. Just awful.”

“Would you mind unzipping my fly?”

“Would I mind what?”

“Unzip my fly, please.”

“I have to go now.” Sonia tottered to her feet.

“You still think I’m trying to seduce you.” Penny sighed. “Now that’s no way to be, Mother Tucker. You have to have faith in me.”

“ ‘Mother Tucker,’ ” Sonia sighed. “Oh, my it’s been a long time since you called me that. It takes me back to the days when I wet-nursed you.”

“We can have those days again. Unzip my fly.”

“That’s what you think! Geriatrics hasn’t gone that far! Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why should I unzip your fly?” Sonia asked with the suspicion typical of her peer group.

“To open it,” Penny explained succinctly.

“I’d rather not.”

“Come on now, Mother Tucker. You’ve known me since I was in diapers. Open the zipper. I can’t reach it.”

“What do you mean you can’t reach it? It’s right there an the front of your pants.”

“I twisted my elbow. I can’t turn my hand that way.”

“Use your left hand.”

“It’s a right-handed zipper.”

“Oh?” Sonia thought that over. “Oh, all right.” She unzipped the zipper.

“What are you staring at, Mother Tucker? Haven’t you ever seen a boy in jockey shorts before?”

“You’ve changed since I used to wet-nurse you.” She started to get up again. “I shouldn’t be here with you like this. I should go.”

“Why? Don’t you find me appealing?” Penny dropped the jockey shorts.

“Well, yes. Yes, I do. But think how it would look to my grandchildren. Think of that.”

“How would it look?”

“It would look awful. Just terrible.”

“Are you a virgin?” Penny asked frankly.

“It’s been so long, I don’t remember.”

“Let’s have sex.”

“I think we should talk first.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything. Medicare. We could talk about Medicare.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Penny confessed.

“Then Social Security.”

“It doesn’t interest me.”

“It should. After all, your grandfather’s living on it.”

“Leave my grandfather out of this.”

“We could talk about your grandfather.”

“Mother Tucker!” Penny spoke her name through clenched teeth.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t I good enough to talk about your grandfather?”

“You just stay away from my grandfather!”

“I can’t. I have a date with him. We go to the same urologist and last week in the waiting room he asked me to play tiddleywinks with him and I said I would.”

“Break the date. I’m warning you, Mother Tucker!”

“He’s cute. I just love his goiter!”

“You keep your hands off my grandfather’s goiter!”

“And we have a lot in common,” Sonia persisted with an aged cackle. “Things your generation can’t understand because you’re just not tuned in on us.”

“What things?”

“Hemorrhoids. Gout. Senility. Things like that.”

“I don’t care. I want you to leave my grandfather alone. Now you pay attention to me, Mother Tucker. Don’t be cute. You leave my grandfather alone, or I’ll make things most unpleasant for you.”

Sonia took a deep breath. “I’m going to marry your grandfather!” she squeaked loudly.

“Never! After our relationship, how can you even suggest such a thing?”

“Our relationship was no more important than if I’d blown your nose.”

“You might have mentioned that before. I’d like to try that.”

“You have. You just don’t remember. It was back when I was wet-nursing you. Ah, the good old days.”

“You had values then,” Penny remonstrated. “In those halcyon days, old people did what they were told. I just don’t know what gets into you duffers today. Always bugging your younger betters. Spare the rod and spoil the senile!” Penny sighed.

“You just want us all to be hypocrites like you! You want us to riot and sit-in and wear flowers and do all the other square things your generation does. But we’re going to live our lives the way we want to!”

“We never should have given you the vote!” Penny remarked morosely. “First that, and now you want to marry my grandfather.”

“Why shouldn’t I marry your grandfather?”

“Would you want a fuddy-duddy to marry your grandfather?” Penny countered.

“Don’t be chauvinistic! Anyway, you have nothing to say about it. Your grandfather and I will decide for ourselves.”

“That’s what you think.” Perry was smug. “I’ve already foiled you. My grandfather is marrying a nice Jewish lady from the Bronx who makes chicken soup and belongs to the Hadassah. The wedding is tonight. So there!”

“I’ve got to get there and stop it!” Sonia stumbled to her feet, wheezing.

“It’s too late, Mother Tucker.”

“Not for us it isn’t. Maybe for you youngsters, but it’s never too late for us. I’ll just hop in my Aston-Martin, hit the freeway, crash the synagogue and stop that wedding before they even get to the chopped liver!”

“How are you going to stop it?” Penny scoffed.

“Simple. I’ll hide all the yarmulkes.”

“You’ll be too late for that.”

“Then I’ll rush up to the altar, push the rabbi aside, grab the groom and flee the synagogue with him.”

“They’ll stop you.”

“They’ll try. But I’ll clobber them with the crucifix and then use it to bolt the doors and—”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Crucifix? What crucifix? Where are you going to find a crucifix in a synagogue?”

“Don’t bother me with details. I’m in a hurry.”

“Synagogues aren’t allowed to have crosses.”

“That’s the most anti-Semitic thing I ever heard!”

“Not really. It’s just that—-”

“If a goy can use a crucifix to break up a wedding, then I don’t see why—”

“Take my word for it,” Penny told her. “No crucifix.”

“So all right then. So instead I’ll bean them with the Torah. Then I’ll tie the doors together with my mezuzah chain. Before they can catch us, your grandfather and I will hop the first subway to Pelham Parkway — it should only be an express.”

“That’s pretty sacrilegious. And besides,” Penny pointed out, “if you do all those things, if you marry my grandfather, it’s going to put a strain on our relationship. Have you thought about that?”

“We could still see each other the nights he plays pinochle,” Sonia suggested. “Actually, it wouldn’t work out badly at all. We’d be one big happy family.”

“I can’t wait for the first Thanksgiving dinner,” Penny told her dryly.

“You’re right, I suppose. Anyway, it’s over between us. You can’t go on working out your Oedipus complex all your life, you know.”

“You’re too old for my Oedipus complex. We’ve gone beyond. As a matter of fact, there have been times when I felt I was getting uncomfortably close to necrophilia.”

“Necrophilia is a dead issue,” Sonia croaked.

“Who said anything about stillborn children?”

“Huh?” Sonia shrugged off the non sequitur. “Anyway, at my age it’s hard to draw a line,” she told Penny. “I once knew a necrophiliac who was orally oriented and who swore to me that his dead partner made the act reciprocal. The way he put it was ‘the deceased ate a hearty breakfast.’ ”

“But we digress,” Penny pointed out.

“And how!” The voice came from a table in front of the stage and now its owner, the same emcee who had enlisted Penny and Sonia before, leaped to the stage and called a halt to the psychodrama. “You’ve carried this improv as far as you can,” he told them, not unkindly. “Now let’s hear some reactions from the audience. You there.” He singled out a long-haired youth stringing his guitar. “What did you think? What was your emotional reaction?”

“I identified with the grandfather,” the youth replied.

“Like, he was caught by the Establishment. But I wanna ask the fink something.” He snarled at Penny. “How does selling out all the time like you come across make you feel inside? I mean really inside. Down in the gut! Down in the kidneys!”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Penny replied.

“He’s just trying to alienate himself even more,” another voice called out. “Why should he have to hide to perform a perfectly ordinary, everyday act that everybody does all the time? He doesn’t go into hiding to eat, does he? Then why should he go into hiding to eliminate?”

“I’m shy,” Penny replied.

“You’re uptight!” another voice called.

“That’s true,” Penny admitted. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Why are you shutting us out?” a sweet-looking girl asked sweetly.

“I really have to — Where is the bathroom anyway?”

“I’ll show you.” Sonia led the way from the stage. She guided Penny across the room and indicated a door in the far wall. “There it is,” she said.

Penny entered the door. It turned out to be the kitchen. A cook stirring a large cauldron of soup looked up quizzically.

“Yeah?” the cook inquired.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

The cook considered it. “Well, ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind,” he said, continuing to stir the cauldron. “But lately the Health Department’s been doing spot checks on us and I wouldn’t feel right taking the chance. You’d better use the john.”

Penny thanked him and went back out the door. Sonia was waiting there. “All better now?” she asked.

“No. That was the kitchen.”

“Oh? Was it? Remind me not to order the soup.” Sonia peered about her myopically. “That must be it over there.” She led Penny to another door.

“That’s the ladies’ room,” Penny told her. “And I’m not going through that bit again.”

“So it is.” Sonia squinted. “So it is.”

“There’s the men’s room.” Penny spotted it. “Excuse me.”

Inside the bathroom, on the wall opposite the door, were two urinals. To the left of them was a booth which presumably concealed a toilet. The door to the booth was closed. A man stood in front of one of the urinals. Approaching the other one, Penny glanced at him casually.

He was a small man dressed in such dapper fashion as to appear foppish. His suit was of Italian silk, the jacket too tight across his narrow shoulders and pigeon chest and pinching in at the waist to accentuate hips that were surprisingly plump for such a skinny fellow. He wore a black silk shirt and a white silk tie. His moustache was waxed. to two sharp, flaring points and there was an effusion of perfume from him so heady as to seem almost a visible cloud. A monocle stuck in one eye completed the picture that was decadent and unmistakably French.

He swiveled his head boldly and zeroed in with his monocle on Penny at the adjacent urinal. Still relatively new to the operation, Penny was having difficulty extricating the proper organs from the jockey short confines. Both hands were required plus a certain amount of consideration before fulfilling the purpose which had brought Penny to the john. Watching the busy hands arranging, stroking, lining up and aiming, Penny’s neighbor was so impressed that he nearly lost his monocle.

“Ooo—la-la!” he exclaimed.

“I beg your pardon?” Penny was too busy to look up.

“Voila!”

“Huh?”

“C’est magnifique!”

“I don’t get you.”

“M’sieur, where did you evair get such truly monumental equipment?”

“It came with the body,” Penny told him.

“If you’ll forgive me, m’sieur, you seem to be having ze most uncommon difficulty.”

“I can’t seem to handle it right,” Penny admitted.

“If you’ll allow me, m’sieur?” The Frenchman reached out a sweaty hand.

“Oh now,” Penny said. “Thanks anyway, but that really isn’t necessary. I’ll manage.”

“I do not wish to be impertinent, but ze way you are managing, m’sieur, ze ceiling is most threatened.”

“Oh. You’re right. But the trouble is I can’t seem to make the damn thing—” Penny continued to struggle.

“A helping hand?” the Frenchman suggested again, reaching closer.

“Well . . . All right . . . If you really don’t mind the imposition.”

“It is no imposition at all. Believe me, m’sieur.” The Frenchman took a firm grip with one hand. “It is a privilege.”

“Aren’t you holding it too low?” Penny inquired. “I mean, umm, I thought you were supposed to hold the—-umm—thing itself, not the—uhh——testicle.”

“Not at all, m’sieur. Trust me. We French have a way with such things.” He reached out and clutched the other testicle. “Now, m’sieur-—”

“Now what?” Penny inquired.

“Now-—” The Frenchman increased the pressure with both hands, only slightly, but tellingly. “Now, if you will be so good as to give me your wallet, m’sieur.”

“I don’t have a wallet.”

“Then your money.” He increased the pressure even more. “And please to be quick about it, m’sieur.”

“I have no money . . . OUCH!”

It was at this point that the door to the booth suddenly burst open. A large man with a florid face came through it. There was a badge pinned to the lapel of the cheap jacket he wore. “You’re under arrest!” He grabbed Penny firmly by the shoulder.

“I’m under arrest? I’m the victim. This man has been trying to rob me.”

“That’s no concern of mine,” the man with the badge told Penny. “I’m from the Vice Squad. We don’t handle robbery complaints.” He turned to the Frenchman. “You can go, Pierre.”

“Merci.” The Frenchman scurried from the lavatory.

“But why are you arresting me?” Penny demanded.

“On a couple of counts. The first one’s Exposure.”

“Exposure?”

“Do you deny that you exposed yourself?”

“Well, no. I mean, that’s what I came in here to do. That is—”

“Aha! Then you admit it. That’s a confession you just made. I hope you’re fully aware of that.”

“No it’s not! What I meant was, how could I come in here and do what I came in to do without exposing myself?”

“That’s not for me to say. If there are mitigating circumstances, you can bring them out at your trial and the jury and judge can take them under consideration. I only make the arrest. Beside, exposure isn’t the only charge.”

“What other charge is there?” Penny asked.

“Luring and Enticing.”

“I did no such thing!”

“You didn’t?” The detective looked at Penny sternly. “Do you know how the penal code defines Luring and Enticing?”

“No.”

“Well, if you don’t know how the penal code defines it, how do you know you didn’t do it?” the plainclothesman asked triumphantly.

“I don’t know,” Penny muttered, feeling entrapped.

“Well, I was watching through a knothole in the door, and I can tell you definitely that you were Luring and Enticing. First you were playing with yourself, and then--”

“I was doing no such thing!” Penny was indignant. “I was just trying to get the thing into a position where it would work.”

“Do you expect me to believe that a grown man would have to go through all that just to take a --? Nuts!”

“That’s what he grabbed,” Penny remembered defensively.

“I was coming to that. First you exposed yourself and handled yourself in such a way as to arouse that poor fellow’s prurient homosexual interest, and then you actually offered yourself to him, encouraging him to hold and fondle you for purposes of obvious degeneracy and perversion.”

“I was just letting him help me. And then he tried to rob me. He hurt me, and—”

“The fact that he hurt you while trying to fend off your perverted advances in no way mitigates your crime. And anyway, I have no sympathy for you. I can’t stand queers!”

“Then why do you sit in johns all night watching them?” Penny inquired.

“It’s my job. I’m just doing my job. I only take orders. I don’t ask questions. Now, are you going to come along peacefully?”

“Is it all right if I finish what I came in here to do first?”

“All right. Go ahead.” The detective watched Penny struggle with the problem once again. “Be careful!” he warned Penny after a moment. “You’re only going to make things worse for yourself if you try to Lure and Entice me. It’ll just be one more charge against you.”

“Don’t look,” Penny suggested. “Then your prurient interest won’t be aroused.”

“Maybe it’d be better if you did less looking and more-—-”

“All right.” Penny followed his advice.

“Watch out! What do you think you’re doing. You got it all over my—Do you know I could charge you with assaulting an officer of the law for doing a thing like that?’

“I’m sorry,” Penny muttered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Now just put it away and be quick about it, and let’s get out of here!”

A moment later they emerged from the men’s room. Sonia was standing alongside the door, waiting for Penny.

“Who’s your friend?” she asked when she saw that he wasn’t alone.

“He’s no friend,” Penny told her. “He’s a cop. I’m under arrest.”

“Get moving!” The detective shoved Penny.

“Under arrest? For What?” Sonia called back after them.

“I think the charge has something to do with lousy toilet training,” Penny called back.

“With what?” Sonia yelled as they went through the door.

“Urinary duress!” Penny’s voice came floating back. “Urinary duress!”

CHAPTER TEN

A Penny saved is a Penny yearned . . .

That was how Sonia felt about it after she’d rescued Penny from the clutches of the law. Having bailed Penny out, in the back of the cab they took from night court to Sonia’s pad in the Village, the lissome brunette found that the excitement of the evening had left her taut with desire. All through the ride, while Penny kept asking her questions—such odd questions really, questions Penny should have known the answers to without raising them; it was almost as if Penny was suffering with amnesia or something — all the time she was answering, giving automatic replies without too much thought, Sonia’s mind was really focused on sex and how much she wanted Penny and how soon they’d be alone and making love.

So it was no wonder that as soon as they were alone in her walkup Sonia flipped. Sonia flipped, and Penny came up tails. So did Sonia. They both did. It wasn’t part of Sonia’s plan, but that’s the way it worked out. Twenty minutes after they reached her place, she and Penny were in a wall closet, standing on their heads (yes! both of them!) and having sex!

The means by which they were up-ended had its beginnings in the back of the cab and by the time Sonia had locked the door to her place behind them, their lovemaking was a foregone conclusion. As soon as the latch was on, Sonia locked her arms around Penny and kissed with a suction that was more the expression of a demand than a desire. To Penny it was like being engulfed by an undernourished, ravenous boa constrictor.

But if Sonia was snakelike in her slimness, she more than made up for it with the fiery femininity of her character. Tall and long-legged, with small breasts and flat hips, she was nevertheless a passionate armful. Her slim legs were shapely, the small breasts high and pointy and tipped with surprisingly large, cherry-red nipples. Her derriere was the plumpest thing about her—too plump, perhaps, in comparison to the flat hips, but exciting in the way it quivered and burned under Penny’s touch.

It was the first thing Penny had grabbed for support during that long first kiss. Feeling the clutch, Sonia stood on tiptoe, so that both the strong hands might slide under her mini-skirt. They did. Sonia ground her flat belly against Penny in response, propelling the two of them across the room to an armchair. They sank into the chair without breaking the kiss.

Still holding it, Sonia unbuttoned her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She pulled Penny’s hand to the stiff nipple. A moment later, the kiss over, Penny’s mouth replaced the hand.

Sonia wriggled on Penny’s lap. Her back was to Penny now, and she had contrived it so that both bare breasts were cupped in the eagerly caressing hands. Sonia moved over Penny’s lap so that the mini-skirt rode all the way up and didn’t interfere with the pressure she sought by arching her long legs. She breathed heavily and bounced up and down for a few moments. “Ahh, that feels good,” she sighed. “I like the way that feels.” Her hand reached between her palpitating thighs and found the zipper to Penny’s pants. She freed his manhood so that it pressed against her tense, dewy clitoris as she resumed moving up and down. She mved more slowly now, savoring the length of it against the sliding, slippery clitty, clenching the inner muscles of her thighs to pinch it as she rode up and down. “Whoo—ee!” she exulted. “I’m ready. And so are you. You are ready? Aren’t you?”

“I guess I am,” Penny judged.

“You guess so?”

“Well, I’m not really sure. I’m kind of new at this sort of thing. At least from this angle.”

“What are you talking about, Penny? You act like we never made it together before. What’s gotten into you tonight? First all those silly questions in the cab, and now you’re playing coy. Well, two can play at that game. If you’re going to be coy, so am I.” Sonia got up and stretched. “You can look, but you mustn’t touch,” she told Penny. She kicked aside the panties which had worked their way down around her ankles during the previous action. Then she stretched luxuriously so that one breast peeped out from the open shirt. Spinning around, the mini-skirt flared out and Penny had a flashing view of the round globes of her fundament and the rich black triangle covering her love tunnel.

“I’m not being coy,” Penny muttered.

“Of course not, sweetie. Neither am I.” Sonia turned her back and took off the shirt. When she turned back, her long straight black hair was arranged so that the blood-red nipples just peeked from between the tresses. She undulated across the floor toward Penny, tripped over the ottoman and sprawled at Penny’s feet. “Damn!”

“You need contact lenses,” Penny suggested, helping her up, one hand grasping her right arm, the other firmly fastening over her left breast.

“You’re pulling my hair,” Sonia complained.

“Sorry. It got caught in my teeth.”

“The hell with it!” Sonia decided. “I guess I won’t be coy after all.” She crossed the room to the wall on the other side, almost bumping it with her nose before she halted. “Take off your clothes,” she called over her shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Pulling down the bed. What do you think I’m doing? Honestly, Penny, the way you’re acting isn’t doing much for my ego. It’s as if you’ve been trying to forget everything about me.”

Penny undressed without answering. Sonia pulled down the hideaway bed from the wall closet which concealed it. She straightened out the bedclothes and lay down. Her long legs arched invitingly and she held up her arms to Penny. A moment later they were locked in another embrace.

Penny’s hands slid down her body until they once again grasped her luscious hindquarters. Sonia rose up slightly, rotating her hips so that the target of Penny’s desire was-—for just a moment-—teasingly elusive. Then she stopped and gave a sudden lunging motion that captured Penny and held on firmly. Slowly, Penny pushed in farther and farther until Sonia suddenly relaxed with a heaving sob and moved to encompass Penny’s rock-hard manhood with a frenzied flurry of downward motion. They moved together then, rhythmically, their bodies merged and afire and melting. Their passion mounted and the room spun around and -

They must have done something wrong. Perhaps they were too energetic. Or perhaps it was just that they slid too high up on the mattress so that the center of gravity of the bed shifted. Whatever the reason, the bed suddenly tipped back and slid back into the wall closet which held it. Penny and Sonia were stood on their heads-—still making love.

The state they were in, it was a moment—a month? —before they realized what happened. During that instant—-that year?—they continued in the exercise of their mounting passion. Even as the realization of their predicament broke through, Sonia, at least, was reluctant to stop.

“Don’t stop!” she panted.

“We’re standing on our heads,” Penny pointed out.

“I don’t care! Don’t stop!”

“The blood is rushing to my ears. I’m getting dizzy.”

“Me too. Isn’t it wonderful.”

“And it’s very dark in here.”

“Close your eyes. You won’t notice.” Sonia locked her legs around Penny so that there was no escape.

Upside down, they finished what they started. They weren’t sure whether they were coming or going, but whatever it was, it was satisfying. When the explosion of their passion was over, they at last contemplated the fix in which they found themselves.

“My neck is very stiff,” Penny commented.

“That’s because you have your weight on it.”

“That’s true. But knowing it doesn’t help.”

“Look. My feet are touching the ceiling,” Sonia noticed. “I can walk on the ceiling. Look.”

“How can I look? It’s pitch-black in here!”

“My God, Penny, you’re just like a woman the way you complain!”

Penny bit his tongue and didn’t answer.

“If you’ll just shift your weight down toward the bottom of the bed, it’ll open again and we can get out of here,” Sonia advised.

Penny did as she suggested. Sonia also slid down toward the foot of the bed. It worked. The bed opened out into the room. Penny scrambled off before it could snap back again. Sonia followed more slowly. Immediately the bed flipped back into the wall.

Penny crossed the room and sat in the armchair. Sonia followed and plumped herself down on Penny’s lap. She missed. She sat down hard on the floor. Penny giggled.

“It’s not funny!” Sonia groped her way to her feet. “If you’d ever had an astigmatism, you wouldn’t laugh.”

“I’m sorry,” Penny apologized.

“Are you really?” Sonia peered closely, trying to read Penny’s face for sincerity. “You shaved your moustache!”

She snapped her fingers. “l knew something felt different.”

“Yes,” Penny said. “I did. You mean you just noticed it?”

“Well, with my eyesight—”

“You should either cut your bangs or get a Seeing Eye dog.”

“I wish you hadn’t mentioned that.” Sonia shuddered.

“Mentioned what?”

“Seeing Eye dog. It reminds me of my brother. And that makes me very sad.”

“I’m sorry. Is your brother sightless?” Penny asked delicately.

“Of course not. You know he isn’t! I told you all about his problem when you loaned me the money. Don’t you remember anything, Penny?”

“I guess I did forget. Tell me again.”

“My brother is a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog.”

“He’s a what?”

“A Seeing Eye man for a blind dog. I told you all about it. I don’t see why—-”

“Pretend you’re just telling me for the first time. Please. Humor me. Now, just start at the beginning.”

“Well, all right. If you insist. There was this wealthy old lady and my brother was her social secretary until she died. She had this Russian Wolfhound, which went blind as it got older. In her will, she made provisions for my brother to continue on at the salary he was getting if he continued taking care of the blind dog. The bulk of her estate she left to the dog. That was two years ago. And for all that time my brother’s been a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog.”

“But what does that have to do with the money?” Penny, mind in a whirl, was trying to sort out the facts. Some of them had been established during the cab ride from the police station with Sonia. Penny had found out that Sonia must have pressured Pennington P. Potter for money the day of the robbery and suicide. It became clear that Potter had delivered that money to Sonia at some point between the time he’d taken it and the time he’d killed himself. That made Sonia the number one culprit responsible for Potter’s actions. If that were so, then Penny had to recover the money from Sonia and return it to the Fuller Lawn Manure Co. It seemed the only way Penny could keep from accompanying Potter’s body to jail, since eventually the law must catch up with it. Penny had to get the money before being nabbed by the police. It was the only possibility of leniency. So, now, Penny drove hard to find out what Sonia had done with the money. “What about your brother? What about money?” Penny persisted.

“How many times do I have to—?”

“Tell me.”

“If I’d known you were going to keep at me about it this way I never would have asked you—-”

“Please.” Penny tried being conciliatory. “Just go over it once more. Just the way you did the day you told me the first time.”

“Oh, all right.” Sonia sighed. “Well, I told you about my brother being a Seeing Eye man and what that was doing to him, how it was making him feel.”

“What do you mean? What was it doing to him? How did it make him feel?”

“Unmanly. Well, I mean—how would you feel if your sole function in life was to keep some old pooch from bumping into things? It made my brother feel like he wasn’t fulfilling his potential.”

“I can see what you mean.”

“Yes. And it was affecting all the other areas of his life too. Like he’d meet some girl at a party and she’d ask what he did for a living and he’d have to tell her he was a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog. It wasn’t so much that the girl minded, or that she’d laugh—-although an awful lot of them did from what my brother told me; girls today can be so damn insensitive! No, what was really bad was the way it made him feel inside having to say it. Put down; that’s how he felt. And feeling that way, he could never even get off the ground with a girl. Relationships were impossible for him. The only one he could relate to was that blind mutt. Of course that relationship was filled with suppressed hostility.”

“Why didn’t he just kick the dog down an open manhole,” Penny suggested.

“Because then his salary would stop. I told you. But he did give the dog an occasional kick. He couldn’t suppress all his hostility. Still, that only made things worse. He’d feel guilty about being sneakily violent toward a handicapped dog. His self-image would really sink to its lowest ebb. Then came that bit with the Internal Revenue Department and his self-image was virtually obliterated altogether.”

“He had tax troubles?” Penny inquired.

“They called him down to question his dependents and his exemptions. It was traumatic for my brother.”

“What happened?”

“Well, you see, he’d claimed the Russian wolfhound for triple dependency. First he took the regular dependency allotment. Then he took the extra exemption because the dog was blind. And then he took a third exemption because the dog is over sixty-five years of age.”

“Come on now!” Penny was skeptical. “Who ever heard of a dog living to age sixty-five?”

“That’s the attitude the tax people took. My brother explained to them that one year in a clog’s life is the equivalent of seven years in a human life, and that since the dog had lived for ten years that made him seventy years old. But they wouldn’t buy it. They disallowed the exemption.”

“Well, I can see the logic—”

“So could my brother. Intellectually. But emotionally it tore him apart. They also disallowed the dog’s medical bills and the drugs my brother had to buy for him. And they were downright nasty about the ‘Dog Yummies’ item. However, the hardest time they gave him was over the way he’d categorized his job. They said there was no such thing as a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog. You can imagine how that made my brother feel. I mean, talk about identity problems! And then there was all that money he had to come up with, or they said they’d put him in jail for falsifying his tax return! My poor brother!”

“So he came to you for help,” Penny guessed. '

“Who else could he go to?”

“And you came to me?”

“Sure. It was just a few days--” Sonia couldn’t understand why Penny was still asking questions.

“Did I give you the money?”

“Yes.”

“And you gave it to him?”

“Yes. But why—?”

“We have to get it back.” Penny was firm.

“I can’t. He gave it to the Internal Revenue Service.”

“Then you’ll have to get it somewhere else. I have to have it back.” Penny tried to be tough.

“Where am I going to get three hundred dollars?” Sonia pleaded.

“How much?”

“Three hundred dollars. That’s what you ga -”

“You mean I only gave you three hundred dollars?”

“That’s right.”

There was a long pause while Penny considered this. What it added up to was another dead end. Potter had stolen ten thousand for a woman and killed himself because of it. Clytemnestra Hodgkiss hadn’t been the woman. because what Potter had provided her with was peanuts. Now it looked like Sonia wasn’t the woman either. Three hundred dollars! Chicken feed! But then where was the rest of the money? Who was the woman for whom Potter had stolen? Penny sighed, frustrated.

Relieved that Penny wasn’t pursuing the matter of the three hundred any further, Sonia changed the subject. “Shouldn’t you call your mother?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Well, you always do. You know how she worries when you don’t come home. Of course, maybe it’s too late . . .

“What time is it?” Penny asked dully.

“I don’t know. My clock is broken.”

“How did it get broken?”

“I pulled the bed down on it by accident. I rnisjudged the distance.”

“If the dog dies,” Penny suggested, “maybe your brother could be a Seeing Eye man for you.”

“No.” Sonia took him seriously. “That would never work. He’s too used to guiding a dog. Even now, if I take a walk with him, he’s always stopping at fire hydrants as if he’s waiting for me to do something.”

“I wonder what time it is.” Penny went back to the question.

“If you really want to know, call up. Just dial 637-1212. You know, it’s a phone company service.”

Penny crossed to the phone and dialed. After a moment a voice sounded in the receiver. “At the tone the time will be . . .” Listening, a look of surprise crossed Penny’s face. Sonia noticed. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing. It’s just that I can never get used to how child-oriented our society is becoming.”

“What do you mean?” When Penny didn’t answer, Sonia tried another question. “What time did the operator say it was?”

“She said, and I quote, ‘The big hand is on the three and the little hand is on the one.’ I guess that makes it quarter past one.”

“That late huh? Well I guess you better not call your mother. You’ll disturb her.”

“Are you sure?” Penny picked up the receiver. “What’s the number?” Sonia recited it and Penny dialed.

“Hello.” Mrs. Potter’s voice sounded sleepy.

“Hello . . . Mother?” Penny choked a little on the word.

“Pennington! My son! But I have no son. No son would talk to a mother the way you did when you left me.”

“Sorry about that, Mom.”

“And then I don’t hear from you for—”

“Look, we can discuss all that when I see you. Has anybody called me?”

“I’m not your answering service.” Mrs. Potter was indignant.

“All right. All right. But did I get any calls?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, you did. Your boss called. I gather you’re fired. Just couldn’t keep your hands off that Hodgkiss girl, could you?”

“So I’m a lecher. Anybody else?”

“The police. They’ve been by several times. If you want to contact them back, just walk up to the first uniformed officer, tell him who you are and I’m sure he’ll be glad to arrest you.”

“Thanks a lot. Anybody else?”

“Dr. Kilembrio dropped up from downstairs to see you.”

“How could he drop up from downstairs?”

“Purist! A thief and a lecher and a purist, no less!”

Mrs. Potter made it sound like grammar was the greatest of Penny’s crimes.

“Who else called?”

“That redheaded floozy of an ex-wife of yours. Something about money. A lot of money, she said. The nerve of her telling me that! She wants you to come over to see her right away. Any time, day or night, that’s what she said. She left an address.”

“What is it?” Penny wrote it down as Mrs. Potter recited it. “Thanks.”

“When are you coming home, you bum?”

“I’ll be in touch.” Penny hung up the phone.

“What are you doing?” Sonia watched Penny moving around and picking up clothes.

“Getting dressed. I have to go.”

“Why? Where?”

“I haven’t got time to explain.” Penny dressed quickly. “I’ll call you.”

Penny left. The address Mrs. Potter had supplied was within walking distance. Penny walked, mulling it all over.

Maybe Brandy, the ex-wife, was the answer. Maybe she had the money. Maybe she was the reason Potter killed himself. If she was as bitchy as Mrs. Potter’s tone had implied, then as of right now she was the prime candidate.

What would she be like? Penny couldn’t help wondering. Something about the way Pennington P. Potter’s body was tingling with anticipation hinted at the answer . . .

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You shaved off your moustache!”

Penny stood in the doorway to the apartment and took in the sight of Pennington P. Potter’s ex-wife, Brandy. The redhead was designed to fill eyes to brimming and then some. She was a voluptuous fruit ripe to bursting, a sensual animal overendowed with pulchritude, a full-size female sex gland coated with erogenous zones from tip to manicured toenail. She was too much!

There are such women. They’re set up like ice cream sundaes, too rich for most men’s blood, molded of whipped cream flesh and topped with cherry red hair. Brandy was such a delicacy. She was a super-special frappé with extra-large breasts-—firm, shimmering scoops — and erotic hips flaring out from a small waist, hips that melted into a lush derriere as succulent as peach melba. Add long, exciting legs with a butterscotch tan for tang.

Now note the face of the creation. Ah, how the sweet tooth starts to ache with longing! Those “dive-into-me” blue eyes, the high cheekbones lending the visage its heart shape, that puck-red mouth with its glistening lips sending out sex signals with every vowel and consonant the quivering tongue pushes through, that “come-bite-my-apple” expression-all add up to the countenance of a Circe, irresistible and merciless to men.

The tantalizing torso was partially covered by a white terrycloth robe which reached midway to the knee. It was held in place only by a loosely looped belt at the waist. The V of the upper part extended all the way to the navel and ample breast flesh on both sides of the deep cleavage was enticingly visible. Penny’s eyes kept returning to it, caught up in the game of hide-and-seek the creamy orbs were playing with the terrycloth. Her feminine background left no doubt in Penny’s mind that Brandy wasn’t wearing anything under the terrycloth.

“You shaved off your moustache!” Brandy repeated in that low, husky, “sock-it-to-me” voice. “You’re a different person!”

“That’s true,” Penny granted.

“I don’t like it,” Brandy decided. “You’re less masculine.”

“That’s probably true too.”

“Kiss me hello so I can see if it is.”

Penny complied. Kissing Brandy was like sucking pure oxygen. Penny felt lightheaded when the long kiss was over.

“Divorce or no divorce, some things never change,” Brandy murmured. “Now about that money—” she continued without pause or change of inflection.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” Penny was still standing awkwardly in the doorway.

“Gee, it’s awfully late. If we can just get the money bit straightened out . . .”

“Well, not out here in the hallway,” Penny protested.

“All right. lust a minute.” Brandy closed the door in Penny’s face. A moment later she opened it and stepped aside so Penny could enter.

Penny followed her into a small living room. The slip-covers on the sofa were rumpled. Two hall-filled highball glasses stood side-by--side on the coffee table. A pair of cigarettes smoldered in the ashtray; only one of them bore traces of lipstick. A man’s sports jacket was thrown over the back of an armchair. Brandy spotted it and hastily picked it up, hung it in a closet and closed the closet door. only other door in the room—presumably leading to the bedroom-—was tightly closed.

Adding up the evidence, Penny came to the obvious conclusion. Brandy was not alone in the apartment. She had a man on the premises.

“There’s someone else here.” Penny voiced the thought.

“Don’t be silly. Of course there isn’t.”

“A man.”

“No. Believe me, darling, there hasn’t been a man in my life since we split. There’s just nobody else for me except you." Brandy spoke with utter conviction. “Now, about the money . . .” Again she eased smoothly into the topic without pausing.

What a bitch! Penny’s feminine mind was reluctantly admiring. It took a real innate talent to lie in the face of the evidence with that kind of conviction. Penny would have bet that ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have bought the lie despite what their senses told them. What a bitch!

But Penny’s admiration was tinged with sympathy for Pennington P. Potter. How this ex-wife of his must have wound him around her little finger! Now that she’d seen Brandy, Penny was sure she’d found the one responsible for Potter’s actions. Brandy had everything it would take to make a man steal, everything it would take to drive a man to kill himself, everything irresistibly physical plus a completely amoral talent for manipulation. A man wouldn’t stand a chance with her. But Penny was no ordinary man!

“What about the money?” Penny played along with her.

“Well, don’t you think we should talk about it?”

“I certainly do.”

“All right, then,” Brandy began. “Remember what I told you about the money the other day?”

“No. I don’t. What day was that?”

Brandy pinpointed the day. It was the same day that Pennington P. Potter had committed suicide. “I called you in the afternoon and told you all about how desperate I was. Remember?”

“No. I don’t remember. Tell me again.”

“Well, it all started when they upped the stakes in my Mah-Jongg game.”

“I never would have figured you for the Mah-Jongg type,” Penny remarked.

“I had to sublimate with something after the divorce.”

“Why not with that guy in there?” Penny’s thumb jerked toward the bedroom door.

“Why are you so suspicious? There is no guy in there. I told you. You could have a little faith in me, Penny.”

“All right. Go on.”

“Anyway, I had a few bad weeks with the tiles and it put me into this financial hole. So I borrowed some money from a shylock to get out. Only then I could see I’d only have this problem of paying off the shylock. Because of that, instead of settling the Mah-Jongg debt, I went to the track, figuring I could win enough to take care of the shylock too. But it didn’t work out that way.”

“You went for broke,” Penny guessed.

“Stone cold. And there was only one thing I could do. I went to another shylock and borrowed the money to pay the first shylock.”

“Did you pay him?”

“Yeah. But I borrowed enough so I could invest at the track again and recoup my losses. The trouble was I lost again. Then it was back to the first shylock.”

“And while all this was going on, the interest was going up-up-up,” Penny figured.

“Right. It was the damn interest that really got me in the end. That’s why I called you.”

“How deep were you in, then?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thou-—Whew!” Penny stared at her. “You really do things in a big way.”

“That’s what you said the day I called. But when I told you what they were threatening, you agreed to help me.”

“What did they threaten?”

“Well, by this time the Syndicate was handling my markers. The interest was exorbitant. They wanted their ten grand. They said if they didn’t get it, they’d dip my nose in acid. That really scared me. They meant it. You can’t fool around with those guys. And when I told you the alternative-—”

“What alternative?”

“They offered to let me work it off as a hooker. They’d set up contacts and collect and deduct it from my debt. They seemed to think I’d do pretty well at it.”

“Well, you’ve got the right equipment.”

“That’s what you said the day I called.” Brandy shot Penny an injured look. “You said even if we were divorced, you couldn’t stand by and let me do a thing like that. You said you’d help me somehow. You said you’d get me the ten thousand.”

“I said that, did I?”

“Yes. You still cared. I could tell that.” Brandy moved up very close beside Penny on the sofa. “Don’t you still care?” she whispered softly. Before Penny could answer, her mouth pressed down, kissing, grinding, hot, moist, insistent. Her tongue flicked like an erotic dagger. Her breasts under the terrycloth were warm, their tips hard as they pressed against Penny’s chest. One of her legs stretched out straight with the effort to balance herself and the robe had ridden up over one pink and perfect cheek of her behind. The thigh of her other leg pressed insinuatingly against Penny’s thigh. The kiss lasted a long time, showed no signs of stopping, seemed calculated to go on forever.

Finally it was interrupted by the opening of the bedroom door. A man stood there and stared at them for an instant. The man had a short moustache which looked like two splotches of dirt, one under each nostril. His straight black hair tumbled over his forehead. When Penny stared back the man waved his arm in a casual, upward gesture, the wrist stiff.

“Hygiene!” the man said.

“Hiya.” Penny replied automatically.

“Hygiene!” the man repeated and wagged his finger at the two of them. “Hygiene!” He turned around, went back into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.

“Who was that?” Penny asked.

“Who was what?”

“That man.”

“What man?”

“That man who came out of the bedroom.”

“Oh, Penny, are you starting again? I thought you promised to have faith in me! I told you there’s no man in the bedroom. Now, are you going to believe me, or not?”

“Not!” Penny told her succinctly.

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t phantasize when I’m kissing you.” Brandy resumed the kiss where she’d left off.

This time it was Penny who broke it. “About the ten thousand—”

“Twenty thousand.” Brandy took his hand in hers and slipped it inside the terrycloth robe. Immediately Penny’s fingers sank into and were lost in the marshmallow flesh of her breasts. “Twenty thousand,” Brandy sighed.

“But you said before it was ten.” Penny found the roseate and the nipple. The roseate was impossibly large, the nipple impossibly long.

“No. I said that was what I told you the day I called.”

Brandy pulled aside the terrycloth, cupped one oversized breast and held it up to Penny’s lips. “Remember how you used to like this?” she crooned.

“No. I don’t remember.”

“Then refresh your memory.” She forced it between Penny’s teeth as her hand trailed up Penny’s inner thigh.

“But ib id wadz odly ted thed, why is id twedy dow?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. That’s why I called you to come over tonight. Ten wasn’t enough. With those shylock interest rates it’s up to twenty now.” She wriggled seductively across Penny’s lap. The terrycloth was up around her waist. She was a natural redhead. “You’ve simply got to bail me out, darling. And fast. Before it goes any higher. That is, if you still care.” She pushed the back of Penny’s neck, urging Penny’s lips to her belly, and then to the area below her belly. “Remember how you used to love doing this?” she whispered. “Remember how it used to drive me right out of my skull?”

The bedroom door popped open again. The man with the little moustache and the straight bangs stood there again. Again he wagged his finger. “Hygiene!” he said sternly. “Hygiene!” And then once again he was gone.

“Now tell me you didn’t see him that time!” Neck caught between Brandy’s pulsating, clutching thighs, Penny struggled to get free.

“See what which time?”

“That man! That man who just came out of the bedroom!”

Brandy stared at Penny for a long moment. “Do you find sex threatening?” she asked finally.

“Do I what?”

“Find sex threatening? I mean, does it often happen that when you’re on the brink of it you find yourself hallucinating this way? You don’t have to be afraid of me, darling.” Her thigh muscles tightened on Penny’s neck. “Just try to relax and enjoy yourself.” She slid downward adeptly, effectively cutting off any answer Penny might have made.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink! Penny was determined to hold to this maxim. But in the end—-you should pardon the phraseology—-Penny was carried away. And then Penny was carried onward and upward to even better things.

The terrycloth robe fell away and Brandy was spread out before Penny like a feast. That fantastically voluptuous body was open to the taking. The triangle of red curls ended in a quivering, beckoning finger pointing toward a sheath waiting to be daggered. Penny stabbed and Brandy reacted with a torrent of motion that carried the two of them from the couch to the floor and then—it seemed that way—-right up to the ceiling and through it.

When they came down, the man was standing in the doorway again. “Hygiene!” he chastised them. “Hygiene!” A third time the bedroom door closed behind him.

“What’s ‘hygiene’ supposed to mean?” Penny wondered.

“If you’d known the answer to that, I might not have divorced you,” Brandy told him.

“What the hell are you implying?” Penny was angry.

“It was just a joke, darling. Don’t be so sensitive.”

“Why wouldn’t I be sensitive? Here I am having sex with you and every five minutes your lover—or whoever he is—pops out of the bedroom and yells ‘Hygiene.’ ”

“Did you see him again?” Brandy was sympathetic. “Oh, dear. We’ve simply got to do something about your paranoia. It really must stem from a sense of sexual inferiority. Why do you suppose you’re so threatened by sex?” “Hygiene!” Penny snarled. “The hell with it!” Penny decided after a moment. “I don’t really give a damn if you do have a lover in the bedroom. Let’s get back to the reason you wanted me to come up here. I gave you ten thousand, and now you want me to give you another ten grand. Right?”

“Wrong!” Brandy was indignant. “You never gave me ten thousand.”

“I didn’t? But I thought—” Penny was confused.

“What did you think?”

“Didn’t I bring you the ten thousand after you called me?”

“No, you didn’t. You promised to, but you never did. And if you don’t hurry up and get me the twenty thousand soon, it’s going to be thirty thousand. Or would you rather I became a call girl?”

“Frankly,” Penny told her, “I don’t care if you do. I’ve got problems of my own.”

“Sex problems!” Brandy snarled nastily.

“Well, yes, but not what you mean.”

“Are you going to get me the money, or—” Brandy was interrupted by the telephone ringing. She picked it up automatically and listened. Then she handed it to Penny.

“It’s your mother.”

“Hello.” Penny took the phone.

“I thought you’d be there!” Mrs. Potter’s voice was nasty. “You just can’t stay out of that woman’s clutches, can you? I just don’t understand what she has.”

“Then you must be blind. What did you call for? Just to check up?”

“Why should I check up on my son? After the way he spoke to me, I have no son. My son is dead.”

“Then what do you want?”

“To remind you that you have an appointment with that no-good analyst of yours at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“If he’s a ‘no-good analyst,’ then why remind me?”

“Because that shrewdie charges even if you don’t keep the appointment. I can’t see letting him get away with that. So keep it!”

“All right. I will,” Penny promised her.‘ “Oh, by the way, what’s the name and address?”

Mrs. Potter supplied the information. “And make sure you ask him about your amnesia,” she instructed Penny. “Don’t forget!”

“How could I forget about my amnesia? That isn’t the kind of thing a person forgets.”

“So remember!” Mrs. Potter hung up.

Penny turned back to Brandy. The redhead was lying there with her limbs spread invitingly. Penny ignored the invitation and started to get dressed. “Are you sure I never gave you the ten thousand?” Penny asked.

“Of course I’m sure. Hey! Why are you getting dressed? Don’t you want to -?”

“No, I don’t. It’s already been too much in one night for a beginner. And I’ve got a lot to think about. So long.”

Penny headed for the door.

“ ‘So long!’ What do you mean ‘So long’? What about the money? Aren’t you going to get me the money?”

“Nope.”

“But where will I get it?” Brandy wailed.

“Ask the guy in the bedroom for it,” Penny suggested, closing the door on her protest and heading down the staircase.

Out on the street, Penny checked the time. It was nearly four A.M. Only five hours to kill before it was time to keep the appointment with Pennington P. Potter’s shrink.

The way things looked to Penny now, the shrink was the last hope. If Potter hadn’t given the money to Brandy -- or to Sonia, or Clytemnestra—then Penny didn’t have the faintest idea what he might have done with it. His suicide note had pointed the finger at a woman, but now all the female leads had fizzled out. Could there have been another woman in Potter’s life? If there was, then the shrink was the logical one to know about it. In any case, the shrink was the only lead of any kind that Penny had left.

So Penny spent the night wandering the streets aimlessly and conjuring on just what intimacies Potter might have confided to the shrink. At eight-fifty-five A.M. promptly Penny arrived at the analyst’s outer office. Five minutes later the receptionist waved Penny through the door to the inner sanctum.

The analyst had his back to the door.

“Dr. Hitler?” Penny said tentatively.

“Yes. Dr. Adolph Hitler.” The analyst continued to stare out the window. “But why so formal today, Penny? You usually just call me ‘Doc.’ ”

“I’m sorry, Doc.”

The analyst turned around.

“You!” Penny gasped.

The analyst’s deep black eyes stared at Penny from under the straight black bangs. His fingers toyed with the smudge of moustache. Then he wagged one of the fingers in Penny’s face.

“Hygiene!” Dr. Hitler said firmly. “Hygiene!”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Lie down on the couch,” Dr. Hitler instructed. “Wait a minute!” he snapped as Penny moved to comply. “Did you change your underwear this morning?”

“Well, no. I’ve been up all night and-—”

“Insomnia?”

“Sort of,” Penny said. “Actually though, I had no choice. You see—-”

“But you didn’t change your underwear?”

“I didn’t have a cha—”

“Then don’t lie down on the couch! If you didn’t change your underwear, you can’t lie down on my couch! I’m not running some kind of pigsty here!”

“I’m sorry,” Penny muttered. “But I don’t really see What differ—”

“Dirty underwear, you stand! Those are the rules!”

“Why?” Penny wanted to know. “Why is that a rule?”

“Hygiene!”

“You’re hung up on that word!” Penny flared up.

“Hygiene is very important. It’s the basis for civilization; it’s the basis for all human relations. Without hygiene, where would we be?”

“I give up. Where?”

“Wallowing in filth. That’s where. And sloppy physical hygiene makes for sloppy mental hygiene. Don’t forget that.”

“I’ll remember,” Penny promised. “Did you change your underwear this morning?”

“I don’t wear underwear.”

“Why not?” Penny wanted to know.

“None of your business! I’ll ask the questions. Let’s remember who the analyst is here!”

“You sure are well-named!” Penny told him. “You’re a real Hitler. You remind me of my mother.”

“Of course I’m a real Hitler. The way things are today, do you think I’d pretend to be a Hitler if I wasn’t a Hitler? I remind you of your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Is your mother a Hitler? Or is that just an inversion? Are you trying to sneak in some hostility toward me?” Dr. Hitler asked suspiciously. “Are you really trying to say Hitler is a mother?”

“Well, half a word’s better than none.”

“Aha! I thought so! You are being aggressive!”

“Can I please sit down?” Penny asked. “I’ve been on my feet all night.”

“Nein!” Dr. Hitler roared. “If you can’t change your underwear, you stand! Hygiene!”

“Maybe I could just curl up on the rug?”

“Oh, all right,” Dr. Hitler relented.

Penny sat down on the carpet.

“Comfy?” Dr. Hitler asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Relax. Just say anything that comes into your mind.”

“I’m wondering why you don’t wear underwear,” Penny said truthfully.

“It always binds me in the crotch, that’s why. I happen to be extremely large in that area,” Dr. Hitler said smugly.

“I see.”

“How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel inferior? Does it threaten your masculinity?” Dr. Hitler’s voice had just the hint of an undertone of malice in it.

Penny ignored the questions. “Not wearing underwear; that’s not very good hygiene.”

“That’s your opinion. And I can tell you as a professional, it’s all in your mind. It’s not a valid judgment.”

“One man’s hygiene is another man’s hangup,” Penny observed.

“Aha! That’s your way of obliquely leading into the subject of last night. But why do you have to be so sneaky? Why can’t you come out and say it directly?”

“Okay. I’ll say it directly. What were you doing in my wife’s bedroom?”

“Your ex-wife,” Dr. Hitler reminded Penny.

“All right. My ex-wife. What were you doing there?”

“What do you think I was doing there?” Dr. Hitler countered.

“Well, you couldn’t have been checking the gas meter. That would be in the kitchen, not the bedroom,” Penny told him sarcastically.

“Don’t get fresh! Your hostility’s only a coverup. Tell me to my face what you think I was doing there.”

“How can I tell you to your face when you’re sitting behind me?”

“Crane your neck. Now, stop being evasive.”

“All right then. I think you were making it with her and when I got there, you ducked into the bedroom. There’s only one thing I don’t understand -”

“Hold off on that for a minute.” Dr. Hitler chuckled. The chuckle had a wee touch of sadism in it. “Think about the possibility of my making it with your ex-wife for a minute. Knowing about my superior genitalia, how does that make you feel?”

“Your superior genitalia? How would I know about that?”

“I told you before.” Dr. Hitler was irritated. “Pay attention.”

“Overlarge genitalia,” Penny mused. “No wonder you’re so hung up on hygiene.”

“It’s a big problem,” Dr. Hitler admitted.

“Quit bragging.”

“It does make you feel inferior, doesn’t it? The idea of my being so big and making it with your ex-wife. That really grabs you, doesn’t it? That really threatens your masculinity at gut-level.”

“Even lower,” Penny granted.

“Suppose I told you I wasn’t making it with her. Would that reassure you?”

“If you weren’t, then what were you doing there in the middle of the night?”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might have been there in your interests? I know you find it hard to believe that my concern for you is genuine, but isn’t it possible that I went to see your ex-wife to get some of the background of your problem so that I’d be better able to help you?”

“Wow! Are you ever dedicated!”

“Well, truthfully,” Dr. Hitler confided with another chuckle, “she isn’t hard to take.”

“You can say that again. Just drop a hat.”

“She isn’t hard to take.”

“You said that.”

“And you said to say it again. Why are you throwing up smokescreens?” Dr. Hitler wanted to know. “Let’s get down to the en-gee.”

“The what?”

“The en-gee. The nitty-gritty. You said before there was something you didn’t understand. What was that?”

“Just that I don’t see why you kept popping out of the bedroom while I was there. Why did you do that?”

“Hygiene.”

“That’s what you said every time you popped out. Why did you say that?”

“I said it for the same reason that I kept coming out to check on you. You see, it was obvious to me that the only way to communicate with a woman like your ex-wife was the way you were communicating with her. Now, it was necessary for me to communicate with her if I was going to help you. You do see that, don’t you?”

“I’m touched. Is there no limit to the sacrifices you make for your patients?”

“Of course not. That’s part of the transference. If you’re a parent figure, then you have to sacrifice for your children, don’t you? I mean, what else is a parent figure for?” Dr. Hitler let the import of the question sink in for a moment, and then continued. “Now, knowing that I was going to have to—-ahh-—communicate with her, naturally I wanted to run as little risk as possible. So, naturally, I was concerned with the hygienic procedures of my immediate predecessor. That’s why I appeared periodically to remind both of you about hygiene.”

“Are you implying that my ex-wife could be unhygienic?” Penny was indignant.

“Why did you divorce her?”

“Because she was making it with other men all over creation.” It was an educated guess on Penny’s part, but it had the ring of truth.

“Well, I wouldn’t call that hygienic.”

“You wouldn’t? You know, for an analyst, you have quite a problem.”

“Let’s get back to why you find me so threatening.” Dr. Hitler ducked Penny’s accusation. “Tell me, what else threatens your masculinity?”

“Just about everything,” Penny replied truthfully.

“Why do you have such doubts about your manhood?”

“You’d never in a million years believe why!”

“Do you like girls?” Dr. Hitler tried another tack. Penny sensed that this might be the looked-for opening. If Dr. Hitler could be prodded into a discussion of Pennington P. Potter’s involvement with various women, then such a discussion might bring to light the woman responsible for Potter’s fate. Now Penny began framing answers very carefully, trying to phrase them so that Dr. Hitler would be prompted into revealing something pertinent about the women in Potter’s life. “I’ve told you how I feel about girls,” Penny replied. “Haven’t I?”

“Well, in a way. You’ve told me how you feel about the individual women with whom you’ve come in contact.”

“Like my ex-wife.” Penny said it like it was a reminiscence.

“Yes. You were very graphic about her. For a while, I thought you were too graphic. But I don’t think so anymore.”

“Still, I guess I’ve been pretty bitter about her, huh?”

“Your attitude toward her was so antifemale that there can be no doubt it’s a coverup for your latent homosexuality.”

“Well, better latent than never,” Penny quipped.

“Then you admit it?” Dr. Hitler sounded surprised.

“Sure. Why not?”

“This marks a major step in your treatment.” Dr. Hitler clapped his hands. “You’ve never faced your homosexual feelings before.”

“Well, my hostility toward women was a sure symptom, wasn’t it?”

“Now don’t overstate the case. It’s not as if you were hostile toward all women. You spoke very warmly of that girl in your office, and of Sonia as well.”

“Anybody else?” Penny fished.

“Those are the only women you’ve talked about. And your mother, of course. Why? Is there somebody else?” Dr. Hitler wanted to know. “Have you been withholding something from me?”

“I’m not sure,” Penny said thoughtfully.

“You're not sure?” Dr. Hitler scowled. “You sound like you want me to tell you about your involvement with some other woman.”

“It would help.”

“I’m not psychic. Besides, the matter of our involvement with other women is purely symptomatic. There’s only one woman any man gets involved with. His mother.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

“That’s much more helpful than you think it is,” Dr. Hitler told Penny, never guessing that it was also much more helpful than he thought it was. “Whatever your problems involving women, you can be sure your mother’s behind them. Motherhood is the burr in every man’s gonads.”

Penny’s female mind reacted to this charge defensively. “There are no bad mothers!” Penny told Dr. Hitler. “There are only bad sons!”

“You see! You see!!” Dr. Hitler became very excited. “You’re expressing your feelings of insecurity about your manhood when you talk like that.”

“All right,” Penny said wearily. “So I’m insecure about manhood. I’ve got reasons.”

“Of course you do.” Now Dr. Hitler was soothing. “And all the reasons go back to your mother and your relationship with her. She made you feel dirty.”

“She did?”

“Of course she did. I’ll bet she was always telling you to wash your hands and not play in the mud and get dirty and never use a public toilet without putting paper on the seat and all kinds of things like that. Wasn’t she?”

“I suppose she must have,” Penny sighed. “She’s the kind of woman who couldn’t help being hung up on hygiene . . . Why are you smiling at me like that, Dr. Hitler?”

“You keep craning your neck that way, you’ll get a permanent crick.”

“It’s the only way I can see you. Answer me. Why do you have that insidious smile?”

“You said your mother was hipped on hygiene . . Well? . . . Can’t you see the connection?”

“What connection?”

“Who else of major importance in your life is hipped on hygiene?” Dr. Hitler asked patiently.

“The only one I can think of is you.”

“Exactly. You see? The transference is complete. I’m a mother symbol to you. And ‘hygiene’ is the key.”

“But you really are obsessed with hygiene.”

“That’s irrelevant. The important thing is that you subconsciously identify me with your mother. To you I am a mother.”

“Really? Well how does it feel to be a mother with that ostentatious male genitalia of yours?” Penny asked maliciously. “How does that grab you?”

“Well, at least I’m facing up to my feelings of effeminacy. If you’d face up to yours, then you wouldn’t always be complaining to me about suicidal feelings.”

“Oh, I’ve complained about that, have I?” Penny was interested.

“Constantly. This is the first session I ever remember you’re not having brought it up. Maybe I’m finally getting through to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“That suicidal feelings are only the way you disguise your effeminate feelings. As I’ve told you before, you’d never commit suicide. It’s not in your psychological makeup.”

“That shows how much you know,” Penny murmured.

“What? Speak up! You’ve no idea how annoying it is when you mutter.”

“You’re hung up on my mutter,” Penny told him.

“No. You’re hung up on her.”

“On who?”

“Your mother. And you’ll never conquer your Oedipal problems until you really face up to your effeminate feelings. I can’t stress that enough.”

“You’ve already stressed it more than enough. And what’s wrong with being effeminate anyway?”

“Nothing. If you face the feelings.” Dr. Hitler stood up, signifying that the session was at an end. “We’ll go into this further,” he told Penny.

“Why should we? I’ve already faced my effeminate feelings.”

“Have you?” Dr. Hitler was skeptical.

“Of course I have. Believe me, I’m one patient who had no choice.”

“Well, if you really have,” Dr. Hitler told Penny, “don’t just stand there in the doorway. Kiss me good-bye!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Penny for your thoughts. . . . That’s what Pennington P. Potter, deceased, was to the Penny homesteading his body, the Penny indentured to his past. Potter’s hangups were Penny’s hangups, the clinkers in the lifetime lapse.

Still, even a lifetime lease can be broken. Or can it? The question, as Penny walked away from Dr. Hitler’s office, was moot. Other questions, the same old unanswered questions, were more pressing. Dr. Hitler hadn’t provided any answers. He hadn’t been any help with that Freudian doggerel of his. Or had he?

In the bright sunlight of the city street, Penny stopped and thought about that. Dr. Hitler had given no hint of any woman in Potter’s life save the three Penny already knew about. There was no evidence that there was a fourth woman. But then what about the suicide note with its accusation that a female was to blame? There had to be a fourth woman. But who?

Even as Penny dismissed the doctor, there was an unformed, nagging doubt. . . . Something Dr. Hitler had said . . . and repeated . . . a veiled hint . . a disguised implication. What was it? Penny reviewed the session, trying to pinpoint it. Deep in thought, it was a while later that Penny realized with a start that Potter’s feet had automatically arrived in front of the brownstone in which Potter had lived with his mother.

Penny went upstairs. Mrs. Potter was waiting at the door to the apartment. Her greeting was surprisingly effusive. “It came in the mail,” she told Penny happily. “After the disgusting way you talked to me. I never thought—But forget that! I’ve forgotten it as if it never happened because my wonderful son could never talk to his mother like that. Not the kind of son who’d do for a mother what you’ve done.” She beamed at Penny. “Wipe your feet!”’ she added, virtually pushing the bewildered Penny into the apartment.

Inside, Penny slumped into a chair and stared at the ebullient Mrs. Potter. What the hell had gotten into her? Why was she so euphoric?

“Why didn’t you tell me that you finally did it?” Mrs. Potter asked, eyes shining.

“Did what?”

“After all the talking, even after that long talk we had the night before your—umm—accident, I never dreamed you’d really do it. I thought you’d just go on stalling like you’ve been doing, humoring me, but not really listening to me. I was afraid—oh! I know this sounds si1ly—-I was even afraid you might think I’d been nagging you, that you’d resent me for being a nag. Of course I know I’m not a nag. Lord knows I’m not the sort of woman who’d ever nag her son. Isn’t that true, Penny?”

“I guess so.”

“But I did mention it an awful lot, and so I began to be afraid you’d think I was being a nag, even though I knew I wasn’t a nag. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“What I don’t understand is why you didn’t tell me you’d decided. But of course I really do understand. You wanted to surprise me. That was it, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, sure.” Penny was still bewildered.

“Well you did. Even after all those months of my explaining to you why it was so important. I thought you were going to just go right on being stubborn and resisting. I really didn’t think you understood. But you did. You did!” Mrs. Potter was beaming.

“Did I?” »

“Yes. But Penny, there’s one little thing you forgot. I hope you won’t get upset at my mentioning it. It’s only a little thing, I mean, considering what you’ve done already, we might as well make sure all the details are right. Don’t you agree?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Then I’ll need another thousand dollars,” Mrs. Potter said pleasantly, but firmly.

“You’ll need what?!”

“Another thousand dollars. Now, Penny, I do hope you’re not going to make me keep harping on this and feeling like a shrike the way you did before. After all, what’s a thousand dollars considering how much you’ve already--”

“What do you need a thousand dollars for?”

“Genuine antique Greek bronze torches.”

“What?”

“Genuine antique Gree-—”

“I heard you! I heard you! But what the hell do you need torches for?”

“You forgot them.”

“I what?”

“You forgot them. Penny, I do wish you’d pay more attention when I talk to you. If you’d listened in the first place, you wouldn’t have forgotten them.” Mrs. Potter softened her tone. “But then I am grateful that you remembered everything else. The carved ivory angels, the inscription, the wrought-iron fence . . .” Mrs. Potter rambled on with a happy, faraway look in her eyes.

“What is the purpose”-— Penny phrased the words very carefully to be sure the question would be understood. -—“of genuine antique Greek bronze torches?”

“Why, to flank both sides of the entrance to my mausoleum, of course.”

“Your what?”

“My mausoleum.”

“Oh.” Penny thought about it. Thinking didn’t seem to make it any clearer.

“It’s the only thing you forgot. See?” Mrs. Potter was holding out a sheet of paper.

Penny took it. The paper was an itemized bill. The heading at the top said “PERMA-SLEEP FUNERAL DIRECTORS.” Directly under it was a motto proclaiming “Everything For The Happy Passing From The Compleat Funeral Ceremony To The Dedicated Care of Eternal Entombment.” Underneath that was an itemized bill. It added up to sixteen-thousand thirty-seven dollars and fifty- one cents. At the bottom it was stamped “PAID IN FULL.”

“See?” Mrs. Potter repeated. “Everything else is on there. The embalming. The choir with the heavenly white gowns. The hearse and the twelve limousine funeral cortege. The sod to be renewed every year for a hundred years. The air conditioning for the mausoleum. It’s all there. Everything except the genuine antique Greek bronze torches. It’s only another thousand dollars, Penny. Surely you wouldn’t begrudge your own mother —”

Penny wasn’t listening. The date under the “PAID IN FULL” stamp had rung a bell. It was the same day as the one on which Pennington P. Potter had killed himself. On that date Pennington P. Potter had paid sixteen-thousand thirty-seven dollars and fifty-one cents to the funeral home!

It seemed obvious to Penny that ten thousand of that amount must have been the money stolen from the Fuller Lawn Manure Co. But Where had the other six grand come from? Struck by a sudden hunch, Penny said “Excuse me a minute” to Mrs. Potter and headed for the bedroom.

A few moments of rummaging in Pennington P. Potter’s bureau and Penny found it. It was a bankbook for a savings account in Potter’s name. The record showed a long line of small deposits over a period of years. Only the last entry was in the withdrawal column. It was for the amount of six thousand dollars. The date entered beside it was for the day before the date on the funeral home receipt!

So here it was! Now all the pieces fell into place for Penny. The woman responsible for the theft and the suicide was Mrs. Potter.

Potter must have gone out of his mind with her nagging. The old Bitch! Penny thought bitterly. And the stolen money had gone to the funeral home. That idea started Penny moving again.

“Where are you going, dear?” Mrs. Potter asked as Penny came down from the bedroom and headed for the door leading out of the apartment.

“To the funeral home,” Penny replied without stopping.

“Oh, aren’t you sweet?” Mrs. Potter was happy. “You’re going to see about the torches.”

“No,” Penny told her with some satisfaction, a malicious satisfaction owed to Potter. “No, I’m not. I’m going there to cancel the order and get the money back.”

“Cancel the order! What do you mean? You can’t do that!” Mrs. Potter sputtered. “What will happen to me if you cancel the order? What will happen when I die?”

“Why worry?” Penny told her. “They’ve got a place especially for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s even named after you, Mrs. Potter.” Penny paused in the doorway to deliver the coup de grace. “It’s called Potter’s Field!”

“Mrs. Potter?” Mrs. Potter wondered, dazed, the final words not having sunk in yet. “Why would he be so formal with his mother?”

Penny wasn’t there to hear the question. Penny was already heading down the block and crosstown to the Perma-Sleep Funeral Home. Less than a half-hour later Penny passed through the portals of the establishment and into a world of black wreaths held together by more red tape than you’d be likely to find in a civil service first-aid kit.

It was up the ladder of funereal responsibility for Penny in the quest for a refund. And there was so much oily unction on the rungs of the ladder that Penny kept slipping. The first step was taken with the salesman who had sold the Potter funeral in the first place. He was typical.

“I only make the arrangements for the arrangements,” he told Penny somberly. “I’m not authorized to make arrangements for refunds.”

“Well, who is?” Penny wanted to know.

“I don’t really know. It’s never come up in my experience before. Very few of our clientele are in a position to complain about our services, if you’ll allow me my little joke.”

“I won’t,” Penny decided. “Now, I want to talk to somebody in authority about getting my money back.”

The second interview was no more successful than the first. “Death is final!” is the way the funeral director summed it up.

“My mother isn’t dead yet,” Penny reminded him.

“We all have our cross to bear. My mother isn’t dead yet either,” the funeral director told him with an effort at rapport. “But I console myself with the thought that it’s only a matter of time. She’s mortal, after all. We’re all mortal. She has to be. Doesn’t she? She has to be mortal!”

“Take it easy,” Penny told him. “A heart attack, a cancer—it could carry her off at any moment.”

“Except those goddam research foundations with their goddam helpfulness, the odds are dropping all the time!” The funeral director was bitter.

Penny left him to his bitterness and passed on to the Vice-President in Charge of Special Arrangements. “Death is final!” this worthy echoed for openers.

“I’m not arguing that. But death hasn’t occurred yet. I just want to get my money back before it does.”

“You don’t want to do that,” the veep said gently. “You’re just trying to avoid facing the inevitability.” He clasped his hands piously. “It’s only a matter of time before your mother passes over. Then you’ll be glad that you had the foresight to plan ahead.”

“I’m trying to plan ahead right now,” Penny said, thinking of the urgency of getting the money back and returning it before going to jail in Pennington P. Potter’s body. “That’s why I have to have a refund.”

“Well, only the owner of Perma-Sleep has the authority to give you a refund.”

“Then I want to talk to him.”

“He’s a very busy man. Death takes up his whole life. I couldn’t possibly disturb him for a matter as insignificant as this.”

“Now, you just look here!” Penny leaned over the desk and spoke very earnestly. “If I don’t get in to see him—-and very soon too-—I am going to do several things in rapid succession. First I am going to sneak into one of your coffins and the next time one of your salesmen brings a prospective customer around to look at caskets, I am going to pop up and scare that prospective customer clear to the nearest crematory! Secondly, I am going to pass among the mourners at any one of the dozen funerals currently in progress here, and I am going to spread the rumor that your morticians drink embalming fluid and have necrophiliac orgies. Thirdly, I’m going to sneak into your cemetery some dark night soon—maybe tonight — and switch the headstones around and maybe scrawl obscene words on some of them. Fourthly-—”

“All right! All right!” the veep granted. “You’ve made your point.”

A few moments later Penny was being conducted into the inner office of the owner of the funeral home. The veep performed the introductions—“Mr. Potter, this is Mr. Perma-Rest; Mr. Perma-Rest, Mr. Potter”—and left.

Mr. Perma-Rest was a very large and well-muscled black man in his late thirties. He had the physique of a boxer. On the wall behind his desk hung a framed photograph of him standing in a prize-fight ring, wearing trunks, and standing over another boxer stretched out on the floor. He noticed Penny looking at the picture. “I used to be a professional fighter,” he told Penny.

“Really? Then how come -” Penny waved a hand vaguely to indicate the surroundings.

“How come I went into the kickoff business? Well, when they took my title away from me—”

“Title? What title?”

“I was Overweight Champion of the World. Of course I’ve slimmed down since then. I don’t have to make the weight since I don’t compete anymore.”

“Oh. Why did they take your title away?” Penny wondered.

“For picketing Jack Dempsey’s restaurant.

“Why did you do that?”

“It wasn’t kosher.”

“But what did that have to do with you?” Penny was confused.

“I’m Jewish.”

“You are?” Penny was surprised. “You don’t meet very many Negro Jews.”

“Black.”

“Huh?”

“Not Negro. Black.” Mr. Perma-Rest wagged a finger in Penny’s face to drive the point home. “But why are you so surprised? If Sammy Davis can convert, why shouldn’t I?”

“Well, it’s really none of my business anyway . . .”

“That’s true. But you asked me how I got into this racket and I was explaining. You see, after they took my title away—-that Jack Dempsey! refusing to serve kosher food! rank discrimination!—anyway, after that, I decided that the only way to make it in the WASP society was to be as materialistic as the average WASP. So I asked myself, well, where is the real profit going to be in the days to come? I listened to what my black brothers were saying and it added up to a lot of corpsey white folks. I mean, there’s going to be a well-deserved bloodbath. Yep, there’s going to be a river of white blood. The one sure way to cash in on that river is to be where it’s running out. That’s why I went into the funeral business. And believe me, what with summer on us, business is picking up already.”

“You sound like you enjoy your work,” Penny observed.

“Well, who doesn’t dig retribution? Still, even now, it’s possible that I guessed wrong. There’s still time for the whites to act fast enough so there won’t be any bloodbath, and then I’ll have picked the wrong business. It’s a calculated risk. Nothing I can do but take my chances and go by past performance.” Mr. Perma-Rest shrugged and smiled crisply at Penny. “Now, what’s your beef?” he asked.

Penny explained about wanting the money back.

“Why should I let you off the hook?” Having listened, Mr. Perma-Rest came straight to the point.

“Because I can show you a profit in it,” Penny told him. “Maybe more of a profit even than if the arrangements went through.”

“Show me.”

“All I want back is ten thousand dollars in cash,” Penny said desperately. “You can keep the rest and cancel the deal.”

Mr. Perma-Rest looked at Penny shrewdly and thought about it for a moment. “Done!” he decided.

A short time later Penny left the funeral home, Pennington P. Potter’s attache case dangling from one hand. Potter had left the attaché case there on his previous visit, telling the funeral director with whom he’d dealt that he’d be back for it. The funeral director had reminded Penny of it. Now the attache case contained the ten thousand in cash and the ledgers Potter had taken from the Fuller office. Evidently, Penny deduced, Potter had at first planned to juggle the books so that the theft wouldn’t show. But as his depression deepened, he must have changed his mind and decided not to bother, decided to kill himself instead.

Now Penny intended to return the money—and the ledgers as well. The problem was how to do it without being detected. Penny thought about that sitting in the back of a dark bar across the street from the building in which the Fuller offices were located.

The work day ended and the people poured out of the office buildings like ants fleeing a complex of Flit-bombed anthills. Dusk began to settle over the neighborhood and the streets emptied as quickly-—and more completely— as they’d filled. Penny left the bar and crossed over to the building. It was necessary to be inside before the building was locked up for the night. Penny ducked into the men’s room in the lobby and waited some more.

After about an hour Penny peered out into the hallway. One of the maintenance men was stationed in front of the bank of elevators. The lobby itself had been darkened, the doors to the building locked. The maintenance man was perched on a stool, reading a newspaper, his back to Penny. Keeping a tight grip on the attaché case, Penny crept along the wall away from him until a stairway entrance was reached. Once through the door leading to the steps, Penny moved more freely going up them.

Fourteen flights later Penny decided to stop smoking. The attaché case hadn’t seemed so heavy before, but now it weighed a ton. Penny crawled through the doors to the Fuller Lawn Manure Co. and staggered to A. K. Fuller’s office.

Luck was with Penny. The safe was empty and so it had been left open. Penny took the ten thousand out of the attaché case, put it inside, and locked the safe. The attaché case, opened so that the ledgers would be found easily, was left on Fuller’s desk. Then, freed of the burden, Penny started out.

It was done! Surely Fuller wouldn’t bother prosecuting now that the money had been returned. Penny had been fortunate. There had been nobody around to interfere with the returning of the money. And then, suddenly, Penny’s luck ran out.

What Penny didn’t know was that after the theft A. K. Fuller had hired a night watchman to guard the company premises. When Penny had entered, the watchman had been attending to a call of nature and so Penny hadn’t been detected. But now, as Penny started to leave, the watchman spotted the intruder and sprang into action. “Stop! Thief!” he called without too much originality, yanking his pistol from his holster and firing a warning shot into the air. “Stop! Thief!” he repeated.

Penny panicked and bolted for the stairs. The watchman followed, still yelling. He was still shooting too, only now he was trying to take aim at Penny.

This wasn’t easy because fear had given Penny a lead on him in the race down the fourteen flights of stairs. Each time he tried to draw a bead on Penny, the trespasser would round a bend in the stairs and be lost to sight. After a while the watchman realized Penny was only widening the distance between them and stopped trying to shoot.

But when they reached the bottom, with the straight-away hall, Penny lost the advantage of cover. The watchman could afford to take the time to drop to one knee and take careful aim at the fleeing culprit. Still, Penny might have gotten away if there hadn’t been the necessity of pausing at the lobby doors to unlock them from the inside before reaching the street. The watchman fired just as Penny had managed to turn the lock and was going through the door to the street.

The bullet, smacked into the left side of the back, propelled Penny across the sidewalk to the curb. In the split second before the gutter came up and hit Penny in the face, there was time for only one flash thought. “This is going to be fatal!” That was Penny’s thought.

There was truth in it. The bullet in Penny’s back had lodged in the heart. It was going to be fatal!

The lifetime lease was up!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

If George Washington were to be unmasked as a Communist, Christianity usurped by witchcraft, the law of gravity pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Mona Lisa proved a forgery, atomic energy declared a monumental hoax, Albert Schweitzer revealed as a rum-runner—-if any, or all of this should occur, the disillusionment to the true believer in whatever would not be so great as that felt by Mrs. Potter just after Penny left that fatal afternoon.

Motherhood had been attacked—nay, routed! And Hell hath no fury like a Mother scorned!

At first, after Penny’s departure, Mrs. Potter felt merely numb. It was as if she was the flag-bearer in the honor guard at the public school assembly who tripped and trailed the banner in the dust in full view of all her schoolmates and the principal as well. More than the flag-bearer, more than the flag itself is involved; an institution has been demeaned.

So it was with Mrs. Potter. More than her feelings, more than the rejection of a mother by a son was involved. It was an institution which had been rejected--and in the most telling way possible. Motherhood’s death rights had been stamped underfoot. And what is a mother for, if not for dying?

Thus, if Mrs. Potter reacted slowly, it is understandable. She was dazed by the magnitude of the rejection. It was as if all the resentment against American Motherhood by all the products of American Motherhood had been directed against her personally in Penny’s terse repudiation of Mrs. Potter’s funeral rights.

But, finally, she recovered. Some hours had passed in the numbed state of shock when Mrs. Potter finally stirred herself to action. She took a cab to the Perma-Rest Funeral Home. She had to find out for herself if Penny had truly carried through on the nefarious threat.

Penny had. With quivering lower lip Mrs. Potter left the place with her worst fears confirmed. The funeral arrangements had been canceled. Her death rights had been destroyed.

Mrs. Potter remembered that she was a Mother, and that Mothers don’t give up easily. What has been undone can be redone. Penny was not to be allowed to do this and get away with it without recrimination. There are limits to permissive child-rearing. Penny must be made to face the consequences of actions. Penny must be made to realize that Mrs. Potter simply couldn’t die under these circumstances, that death was an inalienable right of Motherhood, and that no child had the right to deprive a Mother of this prerogative. Penny had to be located and convinced of his obligation to reinstate the funeral and burial program. And this had to be done before Penny disposed of the refund money Mrs. Potter had learned that Penny had taken. But where was Penny?

Mrs. Potter considered that. She put two — as the saying goes—and two together and remembered the police coming around saying that Penny had robbed his employer and concluded that there was a good chance that Penny might have gone to his office to replace the money. So Mrs. Potter took a cab to Penny’s office.

But when she got there, she discovered that the building was locked for the evening and that she couldn’t gain entry. By the time she’d determined this, the cab in which she’d come had already departed. The streets of the financial district were deserted. Mrs. Potter stood forlornly on the sidewalk, not knowing what to do next.

It was while she was standing there, undecidedly, looking at the building across the street in which the offices of the Fuller Lawn Manure Co. were located, that she heard the dull explosion like a crackle of grease and saw the male figure propelled through the glass doors, out onto the sidewalk, and finally sprawling in the gutter. It took an instant for her brain to register the fact that it was Penny. Then, with a gasp, she ran across the street to the fallen figure.

She reached it at the same time as the man in the watchman’s uniform with the still-smoking revolver in his hand. They bent together and bumped foreheads over the body. They straightened up and looked at each other. The watchman spoke.

“A thief,” he explained. “I almost didn’t nail him. Look, lady, do me a favor, will you?” He handed her the gun. “Stand here and watch him a minute in case he’s still alive while I go inside and call the cops.”

Mrs. Potter could only nod dumbly and watch as he went into the building. Then she came to her senses and bent over Penny once again. She picked up the limp wrist and felt a faint pulse. It was the only sign that Penny was still alive. It was the only sign, but it couldn’t be ignored.

The instincts of the flip side of Motherhood propelled Mrs. Potter into action. She had to get Penny out of here before the police came. And she had to get him medical care m a hurry. Time was of the -- as the saying has it—essence.

Mrs. Potter got to her feet and looked about frantically. Down the block she spotted a stray cab with the light on connoting that it was empty. She waved her arms and shouted and it drove up to her. “Where ya goin’, lady?” the cab driver asked suspiciously.

Mrs. Potter gave him her home address on the upper west side of Manhattan.

“Sorry, lady, I’m a Brooklyn hackie; I’m only takin’ calls back to Brooklyn.”

“But you don’t understand! This is an emergency!” Mrs. Potter wailed.

It was no use. The taxi was already halfway down the block. Mrs. Potter was frantic. The night watchman was sure to return any minute, and then it would be too late. But she calmed down at the sight of another cab and waved it down.

“I don’t pick up Niggers,” the cab driver told her as he pulled up alongside.

“We’re not Negroes.”

“Spies neither.”

“We’re not Puerto Rican.”

“Where ya goin’?”

Mrs. Potter told him.

“Sorry. No soap. Too close to the jungle.” He drove off, his “George Wallace for President” banner flapping on top of the “Poor People’s Campaign” sticker his dayman had pasted on the bumper of the cab.

Once again Mrs. Potter was distraught. Once again Fate called her a taxi. It turned the corner and pulled up in front of her.

“Help me,” Mrs. Potter told the driver, giving him no chance to turn down the call. She was trying to get Penny into the cab.

The driver got out and helped her. “He drunk?” the driver asked suspiciously.

“No.”

“I don’t take drunks; I don’t want my cab messed up. I’m very squeamish that way.”

“He’s not drunk.”

“He looks drunk. Dead drunk.”

“Dead maybe, but not drunk,” Mrs. Potter reassured him. She got into the cab beside Penny’s sprawled body.

The driver also got in and they started away from the curb. It was at this moment that the night watchman appeared from the building entrance on the run. “Hey!” he yelled. “Lady! Have you got change of a dollar bill? I lost my dime in the phone and I can’t call the cops!”

“Sorry!” Mrs. Potter called back as the cab turned the corner.

When the taxi dropped them off at Mrs. Potter’s address, she rang Dr. Kilembrio’s bell. Considering Penny’s condition, there was no one else to whom Mrs. Potter felt she could turn. It was Miss Carridge who answered the summons.

She looked for a long moment at the crumpled figure of Penny which the cab driver had helped Mrs. Potter deposit on the front stoop. Then she spoke. “We take no responsibility for defects,” she told Mrs. Potter. “And we don’t allow returns.”

“You don’t understand,” Mrs. Potter told her. “He’s been shot. We need the doctor’s help.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Well, no, but--”

“Doctor’s very busy right now. I don’t think he can see you.”

“But he has to!” Mrs. Potter wailed. “It’s a matter of life and death! A gunshot wound! It could be fatal!”

“That’s not Doctor’s field. He strictly specializes in urinalysis with a little abortion on the side.”

“But this is an emergency!”

“Miss Carridge!” Dr. Kilembrio’s voice came roaring up from the basement.

“Coming, Doctor.”

“Is too late you’re coming now!” he shouted angrily. “When I’m going to the johnny, I’m telling you not under all circumstances leaving the patient alone, and this you’re doing, and now look what’s happening!”

“The doorbell rang, Doctor. I had to answer it,” Miss Carridge retorted hotly.

“So you’re answering the ding-a-ling, I’m losing the patient. Because of you, I’m losing my license could be from the A. A. A.”

“The A. A. A.?” Mrs. Potter was bewildered. “Doesn’t he mean the A. M. A.?”

“No. The A. A. A.,” Miss Carridge explained. “The American Abortionists’ Association. You must have heard of them. They’ve got the weakest lobby in Washington.”

“You getting your heinie down here on the doubling, Miss Carridge!” Dr. Kilembrio called. “You’re seeing for yourself what neglecting the patient is doing.”

“I have to go.” Miss Carridge started to shut the front door in Mrs. Potter’s face.

“I live here!” Mrs. Potter protested.

Miss Carridge shrugged, left the door open and headed for the entrance to the basement. Behind her, outraged Motherhood pumped adrenaline through Mrs. Potter’s glandular system. It lent her the strength of an Atlas — a Charles Atlas, that is. She picked Penny up in her arms like a baby and staggered after the nurse. She reached the entrance to the basement before Miss Carridge could close the door behind her. At the head of the stairs leading down from the door she elbowed Miss Carridge aside and -

And she tripped and sent Penny’s body hurtling down the cement steps, bouncing with the resiliency of a rubber ball, and finally rolling to a stop on the landing at the bottom!

“What’s this you’re doing?” Dr. Kilembrio protested, scrambling out of the way of the bouncing body. “You’re not getting along with your son, doing your fighting in your own apartment! With my neighbors problems, I’m unmixing in!”

“You don’t understand! He’s been hurt!” Mrs. Potter panted at the top of the stairs.

“So throwing him down a case of stairs is making him better? This I’m doubting! Is some kind new treating procedure I never heard from, maybe?”

“It was an accident.”

“From such accidents undertakings are making money, not doctors.”

“Please! Look at him! I think he’s dying!”

Dr. Kilembrio knelt and examined Penny. “As a diagnostician, I could maybe get you on at the medical center,” he told Mrs. Potter. “You’re perfectly correcting. He’s dying.”

“Oh, Doctor, what a shame!” Miss Carridge interjected. “Your first transplant!”

“Easy coming, easy going.” The doctor shrugged. “The body is rejecting the brain, or what?” He asked Mrs. Potter.

“You don’t understand. He’s been shot.”

“Shot?” Dr. Kilembrio bent and examined Penny again. “You know what?” he diagnosed after a moment. “This he-she’s been shot!”

“That’s what I said!” Mrs. Potter was irked. “Don’t be redundant!”

“Without you’re licensing to practice, keep your diagnosis to yourself, Mrs.” He continued examining Penny. “If I’m figuring my geometries right, the angle from dangle of the bullet hole tells the slug is lodging in the heart where it could be giving a heart attack any beat now. Prognosis is this heart is a St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Any second now is copping out on the rest of the orgyism.”

“You mean he’s going to die!” Mrs. Potter wailed.

“You’re picking things up fastly. You got it. The him-her, it’s a dead it-ling.”

“But, Doctor, you have to do something!”

“Lady, I got my own troublings!” Dr. Kilembrio waved a pudgy arm to indicate the figure on the table behind him. It was the figure of a voluptuous, naked, young girl. A revolver dangled from her right hand. There was a hole in her right temple. “Her brains she’s blowing poof when I’m doing my duty and Miss Carridge isn’t and leaves her alone you’re playing Halloween with the doorbell. So here she is, I’m sticking with her, a nice body in good condition, only troubling is a little lead poisoning in the brain. So now you’re wanting I should take on another corpse—to-be. No thanking. Please to picking up your dying duck and taking him somewhere else like the morgue if you’re wanting to save middlemen.”

“But you have to save my Penny!” Mrs. Potter wailed.

“You’re saving your Penny, means my dollars will taking caring from themselves?” the doctor asked avariciously.

“What do you mean?”

“Is costing money, I’m getting the idea killing a pair of sparrows with one brick.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Doctor, you don’t mean--?” There was fire and Zeal and admiration in Miss Carridge’s eyes.

“I mean! I mean! The pricing is right, another transplant I’m doing. The brain in the he-she still okay, and the body in the girl nicely-nicely, we’re putting the he-she brain in the brain-blown body and making me a doubling transplanter. But for this I’m entitling to get moolah.”

“I don’t have any money,” Mrs. Potter confessed tearfully.

“You got a HIP plan maybe?”

“Penny has Blue Cross.”

“It’s doing the job! So I’m operating!”

“But it was a company plan. And he robbed the company. Do you think they might have canceled his hospitalization because of that?”

“Not without they cancel out the whole grouping. Don’t worrying. Blue Cross stands behind their policies, thievlings or no. Now, please, lady, you’re getting out from here while Miss Carridge and I are operating before it’s too late.” Dr. Kilembrio rubbed his hands together and flatulated happily.

Mrs. Potter left. Miss Carridge arranged the two bodies side by side, and then helped Dr. Kilembrio scrub up. All the while he was getting ready, the doctor whistled to himself, keeping the beat with repeated expressions of flatulence.

“Are you nervous, Doctor?” Miss Carridge asked as he bent to his task.

“A little,” he flatulated.

“I could tell.”

After that they were absolutely quiet as the operation proceeded. The only sounds that broke the silence Were Dr. Kilembrio’s voice snapping out requests for “Scalpel . . . “Clamps” . . . “Airwick” . . . and the starchy releases that made the Airwick necessary. The doctor worked quickly and efficiently. Less than three hours later the operation was over. A few moments after that the patient regained consciousness and sat up on the operating table.

“Where am I?” Penny asked.

Dr. Kilembrio told her the address.

“But where am I?” Penny repeated.

“In Doctor’s operating room,” Miss Carridge told her.

“That’s not what I mean! Where am I?” Penny stared down at the unfamiliar body.

“Is postoperative shocking,” Dr. Kilembrio explained to Miss Carridge in a whisper. “They’re calling it disorientation. Very common after major operatings.”

“You’re right,” Penny said foggily. “I feel very disoriented. I can’t even seem to identify with my own body.”

“It isn’t your own body,” Miss Carridge told her. “Don’t you remember? Your own body was all burned up.”

“And so am I!” Penny decided. “What’s going on here? This isn’t the body I was in before either. That was a man’s body!”

“And complaining I thought you’d never stop,” the doctor reminded her.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Penny announced.

“So now you’re complaining you’re in a femme frame,” Dr. Kilembrio continued. “What is it you’re wanting’? There’s only two choicings, you know. Wouldn’t you rather be in the womanly torso?”

“I’ll tell you after I go to the bathroom.” Penny got down from the operating table and headed for the door to the john.

“‘Don’t forget to put the seat down,” Miss Carridge reminded her. “Things have changed.”

Penny returned quickly. “It really is much better designed,” she beamed. She caught sight of herself in the mirror over the operating table. “It really is a pretty good body,” she decided. Then she looked again, peering critically. “But I look a mess,” she observed. “I’m so pale. I need some makeup.”

“Your body left her purse over there before,” Miss Carridge told her, pointing.

Penny crossed over, picked up the pocketbook and opened it. There was an envelope lying right on top. She glanced at it casually. Then her eyes widened with surprise and she looked at it with obvious interest. “What a coincidence!” she explained.

“What is it?” Miss Carridge inquired.

“This letter here,-—The return address—It’s from a man I know very well.”

“How well?”

“Too well. It’s from Studs Levine! He’s the man who--ah—-was responsible for the condition which brought me here in the first place. He’s a soldier in Vietnam now. Evidently the girl who had this body before knew him too. Isn’t that a coincidence?” She started to take the letter out of the envelope.

“Holding everything!” Dr. Kilembrio explained. “Is ethics in the abortioning profession too, you know. I’m committing to keep my patients’ anonymity. I couldn’t be letting you go through her private effectings.”

“They’re hers now,” Miss Carridge reminded him. “I mean, they sort of come with the body, don’t they?”

“Nothing is coming with the body except the body!” Dr. Kilembrio insisted.

“That’s not true,” Miss Carridge reminded him quietly. “Is it, Doctor?”

Dr. Kilembrio looked at her and understanding broke out over his face. “I’m seeing what you’re meaning, Nurse Carridge,” he remembered. “Still, a certain amounting of privacy—”

“It’s too late anyway.” Nurse Carridge pointed to Penny who was busy perusing the letter.

“The louse!” Penny exclaimed. “From the way he writes, I can tell he must have been having an affair with the poor girl.”

“Is pretty good deducing,” Dr. Kilembrio murmured, flatulating reflectively.

“He was supposed to be in love with me!” Penny was bitter.

“That’s the way the sex is bouncing.”

“Oh! Wait!” Penny was still reading. “Ah, I guess it isn’t so bad. This is really a ‘Dear John’ letter—reverse gender, of course. He was letting her down easy. Hmmm, I wonder what he means by this about not accepting the responsibility for her predicament. What predicament?”

Penny looked up at Dr. Kilembrio with sudden suspicion. “Why did she come here anyway?”

“Why are you coming here in the first placing?” Dr. Kilembrio countered.

“She was pregnant!” The realization dawned on Penny slowly. “And she came to you for an abortion!”

Dr. Kilembrio confirmed it with a flatulent symphony.

“But why did she try to kill herself?”

“She didn’t try. She killed,” Miss Carridge reminded Penny.

“But why? Why didn’t she just have the abortion?”

“She was too far gone I could scraping,” Dr. Kilembrio explained. “She’s coming to me too late. Pregnant she’s coming, and if she’s leaving, she’s still pregnant yet.”

“And she couldn’t face it,” Penny comprehended. “So she killed herself!”

“As soon as Miss Carridge here is neglecting the eye on her, she’s making bang with the bullet in the brain while I’m in the johnny kidney-rinsing. That’s right.”

“And Studs Levine is the father!” Penny ruminated. “Do you know what that means?” She stared at Dr. Kilembrio and Miss Carridge with chagrin. “That means I’m right back where I started from. I’m pregnant by Studs Levine and I’m not married. Only worse! Now it’s too late for me to even do anything about it! Oh, this is awful!”

Neither doctor nor nurse could think of an answer for Penny. Dr. Kilembrio flatulated and sighed. When you’re an abortionist you accept the fact of human drama and tragedy all around you. Miss Carridge picked at a pimple and enjoyed it, just as she was getting a sadistic enjoyment from Penny’s fix.

Penny couldn’t think of anything else to say either. Evidently, she couldn’t escape her fate. But her mind persisted in trying. It kept ricocheting off her specific predicament and thinking of that story—the same story she’d thought about when it all started, when she’d realized she was pregnant by Studs the first time, in her very own body. It was such an unhappy story. It was—-

One of the saddest stories that Penny Candie had ever heard concerned a young, unmarried girl who became pregnant . . .