Sunday dawned, a dull day with yellowy-gray city clouds and a cold December wind. Karp the Infidel snored in bed, and Marlene got her daughter ready for church. Marlene and her husband had been walking on eggs since the shooting of Pruitt. Given the peculiarities of their respective personalities and professions, however, this did not bother them as much as it would have another couple. Shortly, Marlene knew, there would be the crisis—both of them would bellow, trample around like hippos, yolk-stained to the knees, and, still snarling, fall into bed.
Lucy was ready when Marlene came out of the bedroom, dressed in white tights and a deep purple velvet dress with a lace collar and little black buttons up the front. She had a round-brimmed hat in the same color held in her hands, and she had clearly tried hard with her hair. It shone, and the tangles were mainly at the back. Lucy liked church, as she liked all serious things, non-kid things—guns, for example. It was another aspect of her eight-going-on-thirty personality. Marlene sometimes feared that she was even a trifle too dour.
“Ow!” as Marlene plied her hairbrush.
“Be quiet, and think of the holy martyrs, as my mother used to say,” said Marlene. Finishing, she stood back.
“There! Gorgeous! Ready for church. In fact, in that outfit, you look like a tiny monsignor.”
Lucy was not amused by this remark. She put on her hat and her camel-hair coat, now somewhat too small, showing skinny wrist bones, and made for the door. They walked the dog, boarded the yellow car, which was nursed with many a prayer into fretful life, and drove to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street off Prince. In the car, Lucy asked, “Do you think they’ll let girls be, like, priests while I’m alive?”
“I don’t know, Luce. John Paul and I are trying to work it out, but we’re still pretty far apart. Why? Feeling a vocation coming on?”
Shrug. “It would be neat to be, you know, holy.”
“You could be a nun,” suggested Marlene, shriveling.
“Yes,” said Lucy. “I could be the kind that parachutes over the jungle and saves people from bad soldiers. But … I don’t like the part where you can’t”—a faint blush and a wriggle—“have babies.”
Straight-faced, Marlene responded, “You want to have a family?”
“Only when I’m real old, like thirty-five or something. But maybe they’ll let nuns have babies.”
“Maybe,” said Marlene. “In which case you could found your own order. The Little Sisters of the Fruitful Womb (Airborne).”
Lucy looked at her mother sideways, decided that she had been made fun of, sniffed, and fell silent for the rest of the drive. Marlene sighed. Their relationship seemed to be transforming itself into a wisecracking rivalry rather than the warmly supportive figment of Marlene’s hopeful imagination.
That Marlene chose to go to Old St. Pat’s instead of to St. Anthony of Padua, where every other Italian in lower Manhattan went, or Transfiguration, which was closer, was part of the same contrarian spirit that (aside from her vow to raise her daughter in the faith) kept her going to church in the first place. It was not expected that someone of her education, politics, and behavior—Jew-wed and all—would continue to be a regular communicant of the nasty old patriarchal racket, and so therefore she was. St. Pat’s was also a venerable Gothic Revival pile, parts of it dating back to the War of 1812 (which antiquity she thought gave worship there an almost European style) and full of the ghosts of departed poor Irishmen and the present bodies of poor Latinos. For Marlene their déclassé presence took some of the sting out of doing something her mom approved.
They passed under the peculiar Gothic facade and into the echoing space, redolent of incense and damp stone. It was early, not much after seven, and they both joined the short waiting lines by the confessionals set out along a side aisle.
Lucy went in first. Marlene could not imagine what the child had to confess, not unless she really thought about it, and then she primly put the thought out of mind. In any case, Lucy had always been eager for that particular sacrament since she had taken first communion the previous year.
There were two boxes in operation. An old woman in shiny black emerged from the far one, and Marlene went in, wondering briefly whether it was manned by the pastor, Father Raymond, or one of his curates. In general, Marlene was not interested in the character of her priest, unlike many of her coreligionists, who were nearly Congregational in their concern with the style, character, and attitude of their pastors, and shopped around town for the one they considered most amenable to their own concept of Rome’s doctrine. She did not particularly care for Raymond, a sheep-faced man of dull and conventional views, but, she believed, either it was magic or it was bullshit, and since she was here, she had opted for the magic, which would work via an asshole as well as via a Thomas Merton.
In the dim familiar box, after the ritual acknowledgments, Marlene began her tour through such of the Seven Deadlies as had afflicted her in the past week. Wrath, as usual, was top of the charts.
“In my work—I run a security firm that offers protection to women against stalkers and abusive men—I get so angry at them,” she said, “the men, I mean. It frightens me. I want to hurt them and kill them. I sometimes do hurt them, in the line of duty, so to speak and … I get pleasure out of it.”
The voice said, “Do you hurt them for the pleasure, or as a means to an end?”
Startled, Marlene stared at the grille. It had not been Father Raymond’s voice, or that of any priest with whom she was familiar. The voice was low and husky, the diction precise with the flat accent of the outlands. New England? Not a New Yorker, at any rate. Marlene brought herself back to the question.
“I think it’s as a means to an end,” she replied hesitantly. “I want to frighten them away from the pattern of increasing violence. The law doesn’t seem able to do that. I want them to know that if they continue there will be consequences, horrible consequences, for them personally.”
“And does this work?”
“Sometimes. The shock works, I think. Like having blackouts works for a drunk sometimes. They have to choose between stopping drinking and losing their lives. But some drunks keep drinking and die, and some of these men keep after their women and kill them, and then they often kill themselves. Or I could kill them first.”
“But in providing this shock, you feel pleasure. What sort of pleasure?”
“Not physical. More like … I don’t know … moral satisfaction, the sense of meting out justice—now, you rat, you know what it feels like. Afterward, after one of these sessions, I feel depleted; sometimes, if it’s bad enough, I feel nauseous.”
A long pause. She could hear him breathing. She became aware of a growing interest in the priest, and a not entirely comfortable increase in that almost erotic feeling she always got in the confessional: sitting alone in the dark, telling your secrets to a man you knew, but who was professionally anonymous, a stranger, a stranger clothed in mystic powers, the best entertainment on earth, now closing in on its third millennium of continuous performance. Why all the churches were full of women.
“That’s a very good sign,” he said. “The sickness. I would be more concerned if you went out for a hearty meal afterward. It sounds as if you acted with good intention and when you caused pain it was to promote a greater mood. This is slippery moral ground, as I’m sure you know, but it seems as if so far you are keeping your feet. The rage is another matter. Please go on.”
She went on. Lust—stupid fantasies about men she’d met casually or seen on the street; sloth—a slight tendency toward acedia, the abandonment of hope; pride—yes, perhaps a serious problem there, more serious than Marlene was willing to recognize. Without quite knowing how she had started, Marlene found herself talking about her husband. This was another first, as the irregularity of the mixed marriage had always made her shy of bringing Karp and the church together in the same breath, and it came pouring. It was not complaint, precisely, but more like a spiritual confusion. Why did her life torment him? Why did his suspicions torment her? Where was the trust? Why did she feel stifled? Why did she feel compelled to lie to him—no, not exactly lie, as such; more a selective withholding of the truth?
“It sounds,” said the priest, “as if your marriage is far from perfect, and that you yourself have fallen far short of the perfection you have every right to expect from yourself.”
Marlene found herself nodding in agreement for a moment before it struck her that the priest’s tone had been ironic. Irony is not much met with in the confessional.
“I don’t understand,” she said, although she did.
“I think you do,” said the voice. It seemed to wait.
“You’re talking about pride, spiritual pride,” said Marlene.
“I’m not talking about anything. You’re confessing your sins.”
Who was this guy? Marlene took a deep breath. “Yes, right. I have been guilty of the sin of pride. I want to be perfect, and have a perfect marriage and perfect children and never make a mistake and save all the poor, poor women, every one of them. Yes, it’s true. What can I do!”
Marlene had to struggle to keep from raising her voice. She could feel sweat rolling down her sides and clammy on her forehead.
“You can sincerely repent and make a good act of contrition. For your penance, read the first four chapters of St. Theresa’s The Way of Perfection. Do you have it?”
In fact, she did and said so.
“I thought you might,” said the priest. “Now, is there anything more?”
There was not. Marlene said the ritual words with more fervor than was her wont—she was heartily sorry—received the absolution, and left the box.
“You were in there a long time, Mommy,” said Lucy, who was waiting for her on a stone bench.
“Yes, well, I’ve been a very wicked woman lately.”
“It doesn’t matter how wicked you are. If you’re really sorry, God will forgive you,” intoned Lucy in her most sacerdotal voice.
“Yes,” said Marlene, “that’s the catch.”
After church it was the tradition of the Catholic Karps to switch cultures and stop off at Samuel’s on East Houston to buy fresh bagels, lox, cream cheese, whitefish, and carp, this last from an early age Lucy’s special delight (That’s us, right, Mommy?). When they arrived home with their aromatic burdens, Karp (the man) was, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table with the fat Times, in his frowzy blue plaid robe, unwashed and unshaven. She plunked her shopping bag down on the table and kissed his ear.
“Euueh! Take a shower,” she said, and kissed him again, on the neck.
“How was church?” he asked surprised at the attention. He pulled at the bagel bag.
“The usual. God loves us all, and the pope knows what’s what. There’s a new priest I’d like to get to know.” Marlene continued her nuzzling and ran her hand inside his robe. Karp groped bagels.
“Would you rather have a bagel, or me?” she breathed into his ear.
“That depends on whether you’re covered with crunchy little bits of onion,” said Karp and held up an onion bagel to demonstrate. He got up and pulled a knife from the rack.
“It could be arranged,” said Marlene, as Lauren Bacall.
“That must have been quite a sermon,” said Karp dryly. “What was it on? Marital duty? The proper subjection of wife to husband?”
“The Immaculate Conception, if you must know. Jesus, Butch, how can you cut bagels like that!” It was an old argument.
“You mean, holding them in my hand against my chest with the razor-sharp knife cutting toward my heart? My mom always did it that way, and so did her mom. I always thought it bespoke an attractively cavalier disregard of death. Anyway, we are going back to being friends now?”
“I’m sorry,” said Marlene, seeing the possibility of an egg-free reconciliation. “It was my fault, I take full responsibility. I should have talked it out with you when it happened. The thing is, I think Tranh either whacked, or helped Carrie whack, the guy.”
“The noodle guy? He told you this?”
“He’s not a noodle guy; he’s a stone killer. And he didn’t tell me, and there’s no evidence—no, actually, Lucy saw some blood and a gun in his room. So he was probably involved, although I don’t see how you’d ever prove it in court.”
Karp took a deep breath. This was not the time to ask what the fuck his darling daughter was doing rummaging in the rooms of armed stone killers. He said, “Proving it in court is not the point.”
“No, you’re right. The point is, I need you to know I didn’t set it up. I didn’t hire a murder.”
Karp sighed, a noise that represented the myriad frustrations of his life with this woman, as well as recognition that he had asked for it, and that he was not about to make any waves. He put down the bagel and the knife and hugged her. Lucy came in, changed out of her church clothes into jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt. She said, “Yuck! Mushing again? Where’s the food?”
Karp waited behind the prosecution table in Part 46 while the next panel of veniremen filed in. It was late in the eleventh day of what the Post had called in a big black headline, the jury selection from hell. Karp kept his expression neutral as he looked the new group over. They had gone through eighteen panels already and had agreed on but two jurors. Judge Peoples was being liberal with challenges for cause, and generous with the range of potentially disqualifying questions he allowed. Mr. Fair.
There are, generally speaking, two sorts of lawyers with respect to the voir dire: those who think that the selection of the right jury is tantamount to winning the case, and those who think that a properly constructed case will win with any but a blatantly prejudiced jury. Karp was of the latter persuasion; Lionel Waley was enthusiastically, famously, of the former: he had even written a little book on the subject, which Karp had, of course, read: Choosing a Winning Jury. It had not changed Karp’s mind, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t play Waley’s game, and right from the opening gun at that. It made him irritable, a mood he had to hide behind a mask of genial, bland interest (“Do you have any friends or relatives with emotional problems, Mrs., ah, Perkins? Your nephew? Could you tell us about him?”). That might, in fact, have been part of the reason why Waley did it.
In any event, the man’s selection strategy was not hard to fathom. He wanted a jury composed of non- black people with crazy relatives whom they felt sorry for. This was somewhat unusual, since defense attorneys representing the average felon of whatever race typically wanted a “Bronx jury,” that is, one composed of blacks and Hispanics inclined to take police testimony with enough salt grains to cause cardiac arrest. In Rohbling, however, the police were not the issue (although Waley would fling as much dirt at them too as he could); the issue was which psychiatrist you believed. Waley had made the not-surprising judgment that the people he wanted on the jury would have to combine low sympathy for the victims and high credulousness when it came to shrinks.
What Karp wanted was not as clear. He would have liked educated people, of course, people to whom an M.D. degree did not signify the shadow of God on earth, but he had scant chance of getting anyone brainy past Waley, whose attitude toward the well-schooled (on juries, at least) was similar to that of the Khmer Rouge. Waley was not going to allow any elderly women on there either, if he could help it, especially not elderly black women. What Karp had to look for, then, were bright undereducated people, skeptics about psychiatry and believers in justice, even for old black ladies. There were limits on Waley’s design, of course; the judge was clearly determined to end up with a sexually and racially balanced jury, a little scale model of the people of New York that no one could challenge.
Within those limits, then, Waley and Karp were like a pair of poker players, each with the same number of chips, each chip a preemptory challenge that would scuttle one juror. The jurors were the cards they were betting on. Should Karp, for example, let this oyster-eyed white woman with the retarded kid on the jury? A dunce maybe, and doctors had helped her kid, hence a likely defendant’s juror. If he challenged her, on the other hand, he might run out of chips and be unable later to bump someone worse. Karp passed her, in the event, and then, four hours later, they got another one, a pipe fitter, the first black on the panel. Karp hoped he had loved his mother.
Marlene finished reading Wolfe’s report on Edith Wooten’s associates and then looked up at the man himself. Today he was wearing a nubby gray sports jacket over a gray and orange plaid shirt buttoned to the neck. His tan hair had been recently trimmed to maintain the hard edge of geekiness he seemed to favor.
She tapped the report. “This is good, Wolfe. Very complete.” She smiled.
Wolfe, whose face had worn a look of apprehension while she read, now broke into one of his rare smiles, showing gum and a set of bad ochre teeth. Not a regular flosser, Wolfe.
“You put in some overtime on this, yes?”
Head bob. Worried look. Marlene wondered once again why a big guy who looked like he could walk through bricks should bear himself with so diffident a mien. Dane, and most of her other troops, all much smaller men, left damp trails of testosterone behind them. Of course, Wolfe had never been a street cop… .
The thought faded. She continued, “Well, you’re supposed to get it authorized first.”
“Sorry.”
He seemed so. “But we’ll let it slide this time,” she said. “The client’s loaded, and she wants closure on this real bad. I doubt she’ll bitch about the extra.” She leafed through the pages, all neatly typed and well organized. He wrote plain, grammatical English, with correct spelling, unusual in someone with his job history. As a rule, she had to rewrite the reports of her people. “This Felix Evarti looks interesting. The piano. What do you think?”
“Possible. He had that sheet. Sex offenses with a minor girl. And his sex life in general …” Wolfe pursed his lips and waggled his big hand from side to side.
“He likes getting the shit pounded out of him. Yeah, there’s that, but it doesn’t exactly connect with the kind of person who becomes a stalker.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, your average stalker is a regular person with an obsession about a particular woman. She left him, he can’t stand it, so he chases her. Or he saw her in the bank and she’s his heart’s desire, but he can’t get up the nerve to meet her, so he stalks.”
“Like Pruitt.”
Marlene nodded approvingly. “Sort of. Pruitt did get up the nerve to ask her out, originally, but he’s that type. My point is that stalkers tend to be people with low social skills and outwardly ordinary. If they were born middle-class, they’re downwardly mobile—like Mark David Chapman, the guy who did John Lennon.”
“Ted Bundy had great social skills.”
“He did, but serial-killing psychopaths like Bundy are not really stalkers in the sense we’re dealing with here. I guess my point is we don’t see successful, talented people like Evarti doing stranger stalking.”
“He’s not a stranger; he’s a … you know, he works with her.”
“A colleague. Okay, good point. He lusts after her, she doesn’t know he’s alive, except when he’s tinkling those keys; he’s like an appliance. So he gets pissed off, he tortures her with these notes and invasions. That could work. But I hate that he’s an S-M freak. It seems somehow an … excess of weird, even for a musician.”
Marlene thought about the last time she had seen Felix Evarti. He hadn’t liked her, she recalled, and she had, in turn, been repelled by something vaguely wrong in his demeanor, a Peter Lorre-ish oiliness, a furtive quality. And he certainly had access to Edith Wooten, not to mention possessing the musical knowledge that the stalker had shown.
“Okay, let’s put him on the short list. I’ll ask Edie if he ever made a pass at her. We’ll set up a watch on him, a little discreet shadowing, see if maybe we can catch him with the roses and the note.” She shuffled through the pages of the report. “I see you found Edie’s main squeeze.”
“The violin, Ten Haar, yeah.”
“He a possibility?”
“A long shot. He lives in Europe. He could be hiring it, though.”
“Never happens,” said Marlene confidently. “They love to do it themselves. It’s the fun part. Forget him—I’m just glad she’s getting laid, the poor little bitch. While we’re on bitches, what about the sister?”
Wolfe rolled his eyes, a dramatic gesture on the usually impassive face. “The sister. Also into whips and chains. And drugs too. Strictly prescription, though, like I said in the report. Gets them from her boyfriend.”
Marlene leafed through until she found the right page. “This is the doc?”
“Uh-huh. Very Park Avenue type too. Matter of fact, we ran into him the day I met Wooten, in the hallway outside her place. Big blond guy … ?”
“Yeah, I know. He was at the concert too.”
“He was?” Wolfe seemed surprised.
“Yeah. And he knew me. And he had a shot at it while I was making that phone call. What do you think about him and the sister for it?”
“Oh, she’s mean enough. And he’s not, you know, too tightly wrapped either. And Evarti could be in with them too, for the music part.”
“Evarti knows Ginnie and what’s his name, Vincent Robinson?”
“Uh-huh,” said Wolfe. “They all go to the same club to get whipped. I got it down there somewhere. Cuff’s.”
Marlene looked at the page. “Yeah, I see it here—it’s on First off the Bowery.” She looked across at Wolfe, considering, trying to suppress a loony image—a faded socialite, a Romanian concert pianist, and a Park Avenue doctor with their white buttocks in a row, waving in the air, waiting for the lash. It was all she could do to suppress a guffaw.
“What?” said Wolfe, who was beginning to squirm under her gaze.
She snapped out of the reverie. “Oh, nothing, just thinking. Look, have you got a black T-shirt?”
“A black T-shirt?” Wolfe repeated.
“Yeah, and black jeans, a leather jacket … you know, swinging stud garments.” A blank look from the man. “Don’t get out much, eh, Wolfe? Okay, there’s a place called Naughty Boys on East Eleventh. Go over there today and pick yourself up an outfit. We’ll pay for it, or rather, Edie Wooten will. I’ll meet you back here at, say, ten tonight.”
“We’re going there. Cuff’s.” Wolfe said it like “So the tumor is malignant.”
“We are. Why so glum, Wolfe? There was a time when a young dude would’ve jumped at a chance for a night at the clubs with Marlene Ciampi. Tell me I haven’t lost it all!”
Wolfe’s face blossomed so with confusion that Marlene felt obliged to reach across and pat his arm. “Joke, Wolfe. We’ll check the place out, get some background on our friends. We could get lucky and learn something useful. At worst, we’ll have to watch them get whipped.”
“Or whip,” said Wolfe with a strange, cautious look. “What I hear, Robinson likes to whip.”
When Wolfe had gone, Marlene called Lily Malkin, a sociology professor at NYU who specialized in the study of violence against women and who, like many among New York’s panzer-feminists, was a big fan of Marlene’s.
She was in but unavailable. Marlene left a message and then made a set of calls to a half-dozen of her clients, reminding them of court appearance, making referrals, and generally checking on how they were. All seemed quiet for a mercy, and she was pleased to learn from Tamara Morno that Marlene’s dog interview with Arnie Nobili had borne fruit. Morno had heard from friends that he was going to meetings, had stopped drinking.
Marlene was thus feeling very much like a contributing member of society when the phone rang with Lily Malkin returning her call. Marlene told her what she was doing and what she wanted to know.
Malkin stayed silent for so long that Marlene thought something had gone wrong with the phone.
“Lily? Are you there?”
“Uh-huh. Just thinking. Exercising the great card catalog that is my mind. What you want to know is not quite in my field.”
“But I thought sadomasochism would be right up your alley,” said Marlene.
“So to speak,” said Malkin, chuckling. “No, conventional S-M has nothing whatever to do with the kind of stuff I study. It’s not violent. Or probably I should say it’s 99.5 not violent.”
“Wait a minute: you’re saying sadomasochism isn’t violent? Isn’t that like saying water isn’t wet?”
“Not at all. S-M is a sexual game. The people who play it are by and large solid citizens, high S.E.S.— sorry, socioeconomic status—by and large. They have code words that they use to stop themselves from actually getting hurt.”
“That sounds like a joke, Lily,” Marlene objected. “The masochist says ‘hurt me!’ and the sadist says ‘no!’ You’re serious about this?”
“Yeah, it’s all for fun. I’ve got a study here I could ship over to you, explains the whole dominance and submission scene. That sort of includes both straight sadomas and bondage and discipline. It’s quite a read. There’s another paper about professional mistresses—dominatrixes—that’s a hoot and a half.”
“My God, it shows you how sheltered I’ve been. I had no idea. Why do they do it?”
“Well, like I said, it’s not my field, but, as with everything else, it’s the mother—”
“What a surprise!” said Marlene, and they both laughed.
“I’ll send those papers over.”
“Okay, great,” said Marlene, “but one thing—you said it was 99.5 percent harmless. What about the other half a percent?”
“Oh, well, in any communal activity you’re going to see some deviance. For God’s sake, look at marriage! The S-M community apparently does attract some actual psychopaths. You read the various S-M newsletters, you see photographs of guys with captions, ‘This is John Jones, stay away from this stinker, he hurt me.’ Like that. That’s why it’s actually unusual to find real what you’d call really violent sadists in S-M gatherings. It’s like you wouldn’t expect to find real professional killers at those fast-draw exhibitions where everybody dresses up like the Cisco Kid.”
“Amazing! As a matter of fact, I’m going to one of those clubs tonight.”
“Are you? Fascinating! Are you going to participate?”
Marlene hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I’m not sure. It’s never really attracted me. I guess I’ll have to see what the scene looks like.”
“Well, then,” said Malkin, “if the opportunity arises for you to pee on some guy’s face, I would encourage you to do so, if not for yourself, then for me.”
After depositing Lucy back at the loft, Marlene spent the late afternoon doing some special shopping. Later, after the children were safely in bed, Marlene decided to push the New Openness by modeling her purchases for her husband in their living room.
“So? What do you think?” she asked.
Karp took his time replying. His wife, heavily made up with scarlet lipstick, glittered eyeshadow, and thick mascara on her real eye and the other one covered by a thin wash-leather patch of the type favored by members of the Prussian general staff, was wearing lace-up knee boots with six-inch spike heels, a leather mini-skirt that barely covered her buttocks, black fish-net stockings held up with lace garters, and a black leather neck band with little chrome studs on it. Over this ensemble she had thrown her old black motorcycle jacket. To prompt his response, she threw open the jacket to reveal that on her upper body she wore only a skimpy black leather bra decorated with little spikes arranged in a spiral pattern.
“Jesus H. Christ!” said Karp.
“Impressive, no?”
“You could say that. I hadn’t realized we were so short of money. Don’t bring home any diseases.”
“How dare you!” said Marlene in mock indignation.
At this juncture snorts and giggles were heard nearby. Marlene turned to see the faces of her daughter and her nursemaid peeking around the doorjamb.
“Far out, Marlene!” said Posie.
“Mommy, you look like Kiss,” was Lucy’s contribution.
“You! Bed!” said Marlene in her best dominatrix tone. To Karp she added, “And as for you, I resent the implication that I look like a …” and observing that her daughter had not budged, spelled the word.
“Mother! I can spell, you know,” said Lucy indignantly. “And I know what a prostitute is, for your information.”
“I bet you do. Scram! I mean it, girls.”
They scurried off, giggling.
“So,” said Karp. “What’s with the outfit?”
“I got a date with Wolfe. We’re going to visit a leather bar. We’re checking out some characters who could be involved in the Edie Wooten stalking.”
“I see. A plausible cover. Look, Marlene, I can see where you might be tired of me, you want to try some new things—”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Marlene, laughing and throwing herself down next to him on the couch.
“No, really, I understand. I get the ratty bathrobes, he gets the leather and lace … Ow!”
She had dug her knuckles painfully between his ribs.
“What is this, the home version? A little sadism before … no, don’t touch me—I’ll scream.”
“You faker! This is turning you on, isn’t it?”
“Me? I’m a public servant. I’m a pillar of the community.”
“Yes, and I can see it right there in your pants.”
He ran his hand slyly up her thigh. “What are you wearing under that …”
“None of your business, buster,” she said, slipping away from him and slapping his hand. “You pervert!”
That left him speechless and laughing, and she skipped out of the room.