Peter Jensen - The blackmailed mother book II

"AAAAggggg! I'm telling you straight! It's Zeigler! He… he called me this morning… ooohhhhhhh…" Carmel relaxed his hold for a moment, and blessed relief washed over Kim's writhing groin. She babbled out what she knew in panting, gut-wrenching rackings of air. "He… he said, he wanted to make sure you were hooked, and this other idea to get your wife needed insurance, that maybe you'd be so bloody high-nosed and indignant you'd throw her out and not go along with the scheme."

"He… he happened to say that getting your wife wasn't his idea but this one was, and he wanted the photos to use so he could double-cross the others and get your secret direct."

"What others!"

"I don't know!"

"Come on, you were doing so well," Carmel said, tentatively wrenching her leg again. "Don't clam up on me now."

"I doubt know!" the tear-drenched young whore screamed. "I… I think that one of them works for Skopos, but I'm not sure."

"For Skopos!" Carmel was struck with shock. Who could such a traitor be? There weren't many who could fit the requirements – he'd have to be high up in the company, and lives in Rapier City so that he could be near Zeigler and the wives… Carmel went through a mental index of the executives, but didn't decide on anyone. He turned back to Kim. "You said others. Do all of them work for Skopos?"

"No… just one, if I'm right. The other is… is a woman, by the way Zeigler talked. But honest, Roger, I could be wrong. I just don't know, Zeigler never told me. I could be wrong…"

"No," Carmel said in a hissing sound through his teeth, for the identity of the stab-in-the-back traitor suddenly occurred to him when the Copeland girl said the other was a woman. "No, you're not wrong, Kim. You're right, and I know who the bastard is who's ruined so much of my life." He kneaded her ankle with his hands as if it was a neck he'd like to wring. "You bet your sweet ass I know."

"Who?"

Carmel almost blurted out the name – Martin Oliss – but he held his tongue, shaking his head. "Never mind. The less you know the safer I am." He dropped her leg, now finished and unconcerned about the lovely girl. His blood was a volcano of anger and resentment toward his co-worker; Zeigler was the sewer, to be expected to follow his life-style, and Carmel couldn't find anywhere near the raging hatred for the gangster as he could for the man he had befriended and worked beside for so long.

And it had to be Oliss. It fit too perfectly not to be. Oliss and his sultry wife, Cylvia, in the superb position to undermine the Carmel family; Oliss in a company position which wouldn't give him access to the miniskopos invention directly, but would allow him to infiltrate to where the plans fell in his lap; Oliss, the egocentrical socializer always living way above his means and always talking about sex, which gave him the motivation and the ideas for this perverted form of insidious blackmail. All of what Oliss had so convincingly told Roger last night had to be so much crap, therefore – there was no Latin Lover getting into Cylvia's pants, at least not unwillingly and with the intent to force information from her husband later; there was no private detective, either, it stood to reason. What nefarious idea was behind the long, weepy story was not clear to Carmel yet, but that it was total fabrication was evident.

The vice-president and developer of the much sought-after invention churned with thoughts as to proper retribution. Bull his way through? Confront the tricky bastard. Oliss, with what he knew in a display of temper and indignation? No… that didn't befit the crime, and Oliss could merely deny vehemently his role in the defilement of Roger's wife and… and daughter? Jennifer was a close buddy with Tamera Oliss, and would that utterly unprincipled man and wife have the temerity to bring in their teen-age daughter to corrupt his own, innocent fifteen year-old offspring? And Oliss had dropped such a hint last night – with seething flames of tormented loathing, Roger Carmel inwardly had to admit that any abomination who would stoop as low as Oliss had would stop at nothing, not even the despicable corruption of a naive little virgin. That settled it in Carmel's blazing mind; he was going to have to be as sneaky and as lacking of scruples as his enemies…

He was whipped back to the present tableau of violence and lewdness as Kim's raw, accursed nude body molded itself to Carmel's similarly naked loins. She clasped him around the neck in pleading supplication, tears washing down her blue-rimmed eyes, streaking the light application of mascara and makeup she was wearing. She bent her head haplessly to his throbbing chest, pressing her firm, white, hard-nippled breasts to him in a frenzy of terrified subservience, and uniquely, her writhing body strove to join with his in a one-ness not out of sexual craving but from abject desire for mercy, forgiveness, protection, and affection.

"Please… please," she whimpered in mournful, unabashed forlorness, "please… help me now. I… I told you everything, and if Zeigler ever found out, he will have one of his boys take a knife to me… if he doesn't have me killed, he'll leave me scarred." She gulped with horror. "Have you seen what one-inch of a blade can do to a face or figure? I have…" She shuddered and clenched the body of Roger Carmel with desperation, all thoughts of independence vaporizing. She had changed in the last hour, and now nothing would ever be the same for her again.

Carmel's first impulse was to fling her away as a piece of rotten carrion, but then with a bitter smile he looked down on the weeping, shaking head of Kim Copeland and thought better of his indignation. The idea he was contemplating and the lewd perversions of which he had been a partner with her certainly didn't entitle him to be the holier-than-thou, starched collar prig he'd been when he entered her apartment; she'd been a damned fine fuck and had given him all the lewd enjoyment of sex he could have desired, and she'd loved it as much as he had, and it hadn't taken too much to break her down. What the hell, he owed her something.

Carmel patted the frightened young whore on her shoulders and held her quivering body closer to his. "Don't worry, Kim, don't worry. All you've got to do is convince your friend there on the floor that you hadn't been successful in seducing me. The film's no good anyway, so if you told Zeigler anything else, he'd be mad that he didn't have any pictures to show." He grinned reassuringly down at her blotchy, but still delightfully sensual face. "Simple, right?"

"But… but what are YOU going to do?" she stammered. "Aren't you going to the cops or tell Zeigler what you know?"

Carmel shook his head. "He may not have the proof of me fucking around, but if he's tricked my wife to spread her lovely legs for him, he still thinks that will work. Him and…" he almost named Oliss again in a burst of profane anger. "No, what I want to do is nullify their threat, and besides, if it hadn't been for Zeigler I wouldn't have met you, and if I hadn't met you, I wouldn't be as changed as I am." He put a finger under Kim's chin and smiled warmly at her. "The trick is to use what they unknowingly have given me to my advantage, and lover, what they gave me is priceless."

"You really mean that, Roger?" Kim mewled, almost unbelieving.

"I mean it." He slapped one luscious rounded buttock cheek playfully, and said, "I've got a few minutes of phoning to do. Get that bum on the floor out of here while I work, and then we'll… well, we'll see what happens next. Okay?"

The Copeland girl nodded, a tender smile crossing her swollen moist lips for the first time in almost an hour. "Anything you say, Roger. Anything…" she breathed huskily and went over to where Saunders was now wretching on the carpet, and she hunkered down beside him. Carmel went into action with a decisiveness which he'd never had before. He checked information, found out the number of the El Mecca, and dialed. He asked for Oliss' room, but there wasn't an answer, so he had the call transferred to the cocktail lounge, and after a short wait, the familiar voice of Oliss said: "Hello?"