Evan Hunter - Candyland

He is certain now that the blonde in the restaurant fully intended "Come again, sir" exactly the way he'd heard it.

Ben has been in whore houses all over the United States. He has visited one in the upstairs room of a go-go joint in San Francisco, another in a store-front massage parlor in Washington, D.C., yet another in a rickety wooden shack near the Mississippi River, others in a two-story building on the Houston waterfront, and a high-rise on Lake Michigan, he has visited all these at one time or another in his lifetime. He prefers to use the word "visited" instead of "frequented," a more heavily freighted word. "Frequented" might imply that he's been to the same whore house more than once, which is not the case, except on a few occasions he's already forgotten. It's a matter of semantics, he supposes. An occasional "visit" to a different location whenever he's footloose in a strange town and can't raise an old friend on the phone or meet a willing partner in the hotel bar is not the same thing, for example, as Simenon strolling down into the village each and every day of his life to "frequent" the local whores when he wasn't being seductive with his own daughter who wore his wedding band, for Christ's sake! Ben has never given Margaret a ring in his lifetime. Nor has he ever behaved in anything but a circumspect manner with his daughter, who is just a little younger than Cindy here, but nowhere near as invitingly juicy. He suddenly wonders if the man on the phone just now, the one Heidi Will be watching for, the one probably speeding breathlessly crosstown in a taxi through the rain, could possibly be Charles the First, wouldn't that be something! Run into his own son-in-law here in an Upper East Side whore house? Talk about worst fears realized. Charles the First with his meager dick in his hand, Ben feels certain.

He does not know where Cindy is leading him. He is usually good at assembling in his head complete structures by viewing merely disparate parts. But he suspects the original architecture in this old building has been altered in recent years, interior walls, ceilings and stairwells restructured to accommodate a previously unanticipated use. He feels as if he is being led through dim, labyrinthine corridors in an old fortress, up secret staircases to the king's chambers or perhaps to a tower room where prisoners hang in chains on dripping stone walls — Yonder lies d'castle of my fodder dcaliph. There is the caustic scent of Lysol again, He suspects they have come several flights up and have now exited into the same interior stairwell space again, coming down a banistered corridor similar to the corridor two or three floors below, where Charles the First might at this very moment be knocking on a door identical to the one here, save for the brass letter B for Beautiful, God forbid.

Cindy has a key to the door.

Voilà!

She pulls it from the cleft between her ample breasts, glances back at him once again, smiling, and inserts it into the keyway in the door. He wonders if all these minutes climbing and strolling and now waiting for Cindy to unlock the door here will be deducted from the hour for which he'll soon be shelling out a hundred bucks minimum. He hopes not. He doesn't wish to get into an accounting dispute with a common whore who will then undoubtedly have to check with the high command on the other end of the phone, the person or persons screening any potential "client" (as Heidi had called him not a few moments before), the keepers of the gate who'd asked her to "watch" for any arriving Peter, Paul, or Charles — bite your tongue.

Cindy flings the door open, flicks a light switch, and steps aside to let him pass. He is aware again of her truly extraordinary breasts, creamy white and soft in the red bra, a Wonderbra, no doubt, otherwise she's all the more wonderful. As he moves past her, the scent of her perfume wafts about him, not quite "Sweet Gardenia and Lace" but not "Cheap Pussy and Piss," either, more a blend of "Girl Next Door" and "Femme Fatale." Grace never wears perfume. Never. She prides herself on smelling of good clean soap. Has it ever occurred to her, he wonders, that a man might sometimes prefer a woman who smells cheap? A woman who reeks of sex, has that ever occurred to you, Grace?

There is a king-sized bed in a room the size of his own vast living room back in Topanga Canyon. The room here appears even larger because it is virtually unfurnished. There is the bed, a pair of night tables flanking it, a lamp on each table, a painting of a nude above the bed, a single wooden straight-backed chair at the foot of the bed — and that is it. Minimalist design, be thinks. The painting looks as if someone purchased it at one of those store-front galleries that sell genuine Rembrandts for thirty dollars apiece, you see them all up and down Broadway, Gypsy Girl lying voluptuously on an inexpertly rendered, fringed red velvet throw, one leg outstretched, the other bent at the knee, breasts tipped with bursting nipples, secret smile on her face, at least she's wearing golden earrings, so who knows? Cheap. The painting is cheap, and the room is cheap and the frizzed blonde in the Victoria's Secret lingerie is cheap. And you are cheap for being here, he thinks. In which case, don't fucking smell of soap all the time!

"So," Cindy says, "you want to make yourself comfortable?"

She says this not because she's trying to be seductive but only because, if he's a cop, she wants him naked before she asks for money. In that way, he will have already compromised his position. Legally. He will have engaged in something called entrapment, which for some legal reason will cause a judge to throw the case out of court. Entrapment was explained to him a long time ago by a hooker who used to be a police officer before she realized there was better money to be made out of uniform. Though why prostitutes, trapped or otherwise, should be dragged into court in the first place is another thing Ben can't quite understand. This isn't somebody sniffing his life up his nose or drinking it into the gutter. This is a productive human being satisfying a perfectly normal and natural urge, which thank God there are women like Cindy willing to satisfy, however cheap they may seem to some.

Still fully dressed — or at least more fully dressed than the girl in the painting over the bed — she watches him as he takes off his clothes. This is a little embarrassing because he is already faintly tumescent, and he doesn't want her to think he's some horny jerk who wandered in off the street, but at the same time he wants her to know she's going to get fucked within an inch of tier life, wants her to see the weapon he's still got hidden in his pants because he's removing first his jacket and then his shirt and tie and shoes and socks, and now his trousers, and nowhere it comes, sweetheart, shield your eyes, you are about to witness a rod of such astonishing magnitude and dimension that it will forever change your perceptions of width, length, and girth! Are you ready? Get set…

He takes off his undershorts.

"Nice," she says. "Very nice, Michael. Impressive."

Which they always say in one way or another. My, what a huge cock! Boy, are you endowed! You don't plan to stick that thing in me, do you?

He knows they're exaggerating. Well, lying, in fact. He's not really that big. He's not some black guy with a dong like Godzilla's, which is what occasional hookers have told him black guys possess, intimately sharing racial sex secrets with him after they've been in bed together for ten minutes and know each other like good old home boys from the hood. He knows these girls are being paid to tell him how wonderful and manly and sexy and exciting he is. He knows this. But he smiles modestly anyway, and feels himself growing perceptibly larger as she studies his cock with all the solemnity and professional aplomb of a urologist.