Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

Not that her bosom remained untouched for the rest of that night. When she returned home to her apartment, her bosom was pinched, tweaked, slapped, and bitten by one Donald (Hooks) Basumo as her punishment for "wasting the night with that faggy teacher when I been here waiting for you. Whatta you two doing anyway?"

"I told you, dearest," Janet said, bending to pick up the five empty beer cans that littered the living-room floor. "I stay close to him because I think someday he may have some money."

"Yeah? How close are you staying is what I want to know?"

"Darling." Janet Hawley smiled. "Nothing. He never even touches me. He never even tries."

"He better not and you better not let 'im. I don't like my broads being handled by other people," explained Donald (Hooks) Basumo, displaying a morality based upon the fact that of twenty-seven arrests upon his record, a full one-third of them had failed to result in convictions.

Hooks emphasized this with a stinging right hand slap across Janet's bare breasts, then he sat back in a living-room chair and watched her clean the mess he had made in her apartment. When she finished sponging up the last of the spilled onion dip, Hooks pulled her into the bedroom and threw her onto the unmade bed where he raped her, Basumo's sexual technique bearing the same relationship to making love that the Blitzkrieg did to backgammon.

Then, still fully clothed, Hooks rolled off Janet onto his side and began to snore, the peaceful purr of the pure at heart. Janet Hawley undressed herself and lay in bed thinking.

An hour later, she kissed Hooks on the neck. He growled but snored on. A half-hour later, she tried again and this time, the snoring stopped.

"Honey," she said. "I've been thinking."

Hooks blinked himself into the waking world.

"Whadja say?"

"I've been thinking, honey," said Janet.

"Get outta here," said Hooks and belted her in the ear.

She screamed. She yelled that it was her apartment. That she paid the rent. She bought the beer. He had no right to hit her.

So he hit her again and now he was fully awake. The screaming had done it. He told her he would listen to her if she brought him a beer.

She answered that she wouldn't bring him a beer if his face was on fire. He hit her in the other ear.

She brought him the beer and told him that all night she had been thinking about a marvelous device she had just seen. You could get thoughts on a television screen, see whatever you imagined. All you had to do was think something and you would see it acted out for you on TV.

"For this you woke me?" he said.

He didn't like the idea. Anything that required thought would not sell to the American public, he said. Things that sold to the American public were things you didn't have to think to use.

She said she had seen dirty pictures on the screen.

Hooks Basumo cocked his head.

"You say dirty?" he asked.

"Yeah. You can imagine yourself humping anybody."

"Yeah? Raquel Welch? Sophia Loren?"

"Yeah. Burt Reynolds. Robert Redford," she said.

"Yeah? Charo? Maude's daughter?"

"Yeah," she said. "Clint Eastwood. Paul Newman. Charles Bronson. Anybody."

He belted her again because she seemed able to think of more names than he could, but then he stayed awake the whole night, making Janet tell him all the details, making sure she didn't forget anything. What he heard was money, lots of money.

And when he described it to a local fence the next day, he said he knew where he could get his hands on a new kind of porno machine. Anything you imagined would appear on the screen.

"I don't know. It would be tough to sell," said the fence. "Does it come with directions?"

Hooks allowed as how he didn't know and the fence turned him down because that special television would be too easy to trace since apparently it was the only one of its kind.

This outraged Hooks Basumo. If it was only one of a kind it had to be worth more. He looked menacingly at the little man. He hinted about how little men could get hurt late at night. He noticed what a fire hazard the fence's home was.

"Hooks," said the fence, "I can get your bones broken for eighteen dollars. Get out of here."

Hooks raised a finger in obscene contempt and left muttering about the fence's lack of masculinity because if anyone ever gave Hooks the finger like that, they'd frigging get their frigging head handed to them.

At a newsstand, he waited for someone to drop a dollar for change, then snatched it and ran. You could get away with that if the owner really was blind. It was those sneaks who were only partially blind who could cross you up. They could see the outlines of hands moving.

But Hooks knew his newsstands. A man of respect was always careful. It was the punks who were careless. At a Dunkin Donut, he got a jelly filled and a cup of coffee light. He also picked up twenty-three cents in tips someone had carelessly left under a soggy napkin.

A black Cadillac Seville waited outside with two men staring at Hooks. They had faces like pavements but with less warmth.

They had bulges in their silk suits. They did not smile.

When Hooks left the doughnut shop, the black car pulled up next to him on the curb.

"Hooks, get in," said the man next to the driver.

"I don't know you," said Hooks. The man in the front seat didn't say anything at all. He just stared at Hooks. Hooks got into the back seat.

They drove out of St. Louis proper on a route paralleling the Mississippi, fat with spring waters, wide as a lake. The car entered a fenced-off marina and Hooks saw a large white boat moored solid to a pier. The man in the front seat opened the rear door for Hooks.

"I didn't do it, I swear," said Hooks. And the man nodded him toward a gangplank.

At the top of the ramp, a round-faced man, sweating from the effort of keeping his fat supplied with blood and oxygen, nodded Hooks into a passageway.

"I didn't do it," said Hooks.

Hooks went down steps, his legs weak.

"I didn't do it," said Hooks to a man in a black tuxedo.

"I'm the butler," said the man.

When Hooks entered the room, and when he saw who sat on a large couch, he found himself unable to deny guilt. This was because the room spun around him and his legs were not beneath him and he was looking up. If he were looking up, he reasoned, his back must be on the floor. And who was giving him water?

Don Salvatore Massello himself. That's who was pressing a glass of water to his lips and asking if he were all right.

"Oh, Jesus," said Hooks. For now he was sure this was Massello. He had seen pictures in the newspapers and on television when Mr. Massello, surrounded by lawyers, had declined to talk to reporter?.

There was the silver hair, the thin haughty nose, the immaculate dark eyebrows and the black eyes. And they were looking down at him and the lips were asking him if he were all right.

"Yes. Yes. Yes sir," said Hooks.

"Thank you for coming," said Mr. Massello.

"My pleasure and anytime, Mr. Massello, sir. An honor."

"And it is an honor to see you also, Mr. Basumo. May I call you Donald?" said Mr. Massello, helping Hooks to his feet and sitting him in a stuffed velvet chair and personally pouring him a glass of thick, sweet yellow Strega.

"Donald," said Mr. Massello, "we live in dangerous times."

"I didn't do it, sir. On my mother's sacred heart, I didn't do it."

"Do what, Donald?"

"Whatever, sir. I swear it."

Mr. Massello nodded with a tiredness that suggested the wisdom of the world.

"There are things men of respect must do to survive and I respect you for whatever you have done. I am proud to call you a friend, a brother."

Hooks offered to knock off any newsstand in the city for Mr. Massello, owned by a sighted person or not.