She just looked at me. Had I offended her?
“A hundred dollars,” she said. “My place isn’t far. But let’s have our drinks first. At these prices, we can’t afford not to. And, anyway, I’m just getting to know you.”
After a five-minute stroll from the Classic Cat up tree-lined Alta Loma, ending in a cul-de-sac, an unlikely garden oasis materialized just steps away from the chaos of the Strip. Once I’d taken in its Spanish-inspired white exterior walls and orange-tile roof, and gone arm-in-arm with Marguerite through the canopied entrance—
— the residential hotel gave off a distinctly druggy cast. Beyond its unadorned open reception area, the large patio and pool welcomed skinny long-haired pasty-faced rockers in black t-shirts and black jeans clinging to shadows and sprawling on lounge chairs beneath patio umbrellas like vampires shy of the sun. English accents buzzed here and there like mosquito nests, and now and then a familiar show biz face would appear among the hippie rabble — Mike Nichols, Bill Cosby, Van Heflin. And me without my autograph book.
The rooms were off the pool and Marguerite was in one of them. The furnishings were (as advertised on a cheap sign outside) attractive, but in a modern way that had immediately dated. The place had a kitchenette and the walls bore posters of Marilyn by Warhol, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, and The Doors at the Whisky a Go Go.
My hostess led me to an orange floral sofa without armrests in front of a low-slung glass-topped coffee table that had marijuana makings spread out like do-it-yourself party favors.
Marguerite perched next to me, rolled a joint, lit it, offered it to me, I declined, and she said, “You aren’t one of those stuffy older generation types, are you?”
“I’m not a narc. That’s the best I can do.”
She laughed. I wasn’t crazy about the sweet smell of the smoke, but it wasn’t an issue.
Helpfully, she asked, “Can I get you something to drink? I could make you a Seven and Seven.”
“No thanks.”
She made a mock “hurt” face. “Oh. All business. Boring!”
“Business first. Fun time after.”
“All right. Let’s see the color of your money.”
I got out my billfold and gave her a crisp hundred.
“Fancy!” she said and tossed it folded onto the coffee table. She slipped an arm around my shoulder. “You want to fool around? Or did you want to know more about the doc?”
“Let’s start there. Anything you care to share.”
She frowned coquettishly at me. “What do you want to know for? Some husband whose wife got hypnotized and then came home with a hickey? He’s really harmless, the doc. He puts them under and feels them up and, you know, Chubby gets a chubby.”
“This isn’t about that. It’s more about his work for the LAPD and the CIA.”
I’d laid that out there bluntly but she didn’t flinch.
“I imagine Susie told you about how he caught the Boston Strangler,” Marguerite said. “Or anyway says he did.”
“Yeah. And the Hollywood Strangler, too.”
“He’s big on stranglers, the doc. And that rich guy who killed his wife, Bryant helped the defense with that one, too, he says. But the guy went down for it anyway. The doc says if he’d been brought in sooner he could’ve got that guy off.”
“Not in a sexual way, I hope.”
“Ha! I should hope not. Listen, I hope I didn’t lure you out here under false pretenses. I don’t really know anything more than Susie probably already told you, about him helping the LAPD. As far as the CIA goes, he brags about that a lot, but isn’t, you know, specific.”
“Susie mentioned Sirhan Sirhan.”
That stopped her for a moment, but just a moment. “The creep who shot Bobby Kennedy? The doc did say something about that. I think he hypnotized that guy for the prosecution, getting ready for the trial or something.”
“Funny. His name doesn’t turn up anywhere in the court transcripts, and several other hypnotists and psychiatrists do.”
She shrugged. She placed the joint in an ashtray and cuddled up. “Now you know everything I know.”
“About the doc, maybe.”
“I dig older guys, y’know.”
“Do you.”
She kissed me; it was a sticky, sexy thing, but when she put her tongue in my mouth, it tasted like weed. Still, it went on a while and those long nails clawed sensually at my hair and then one pricked teasingly the back of my neck just as the kiss ended.
“Ow,” I said, softly, with a smile.
“You just sit there. Did you like my zebra dance? At the Cat?”
“It was swell.”
“You just sit there!”
She got off the couch and padded over to a portable stereo on a stand. She knelt and thumbed through LPs in a rack below, and in that short white skirt was something to see. She made her selection and started it playing. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass — “A Taste of Honey.”
There was no striptease. She just stepped out of the black-and-white miniskirt, kicked it away, and then out of her sheer panties and kicked those away too, then pulled the sleeveless white top off and smiled a little, well aware of the impact her full breasts could have on a man. Now all she wore were the white go-go boots, and she began a little pony dance.
Goddamn, she was a lovely thing. Unlike the poolside rockers, she was tan everywhere except where her bikini had kept her legal, and her pubic bush was a defiant thing, curling black against white flesh, as wild and tangled as the garden grounds of the Marquis.
And I won’t lie to you. I was hard. I considered fucking her to keep things honest — you know, credible. To demonstrate that this was about more than just me pumping her, so to speak, about Bryant.
Maybe if she hadn’t been brunette. Maybe if she hadn’t looked a little like Nita, maybe I could have been the old randy Nate Heller. But seeing this incredible, available young thing (definitely not sweet young thing) in the altogether only made me think of Nita. Had I really gotten this old? Or had I finally grown up?
Now I was the one being hypnotized, by her undulating hips, by the swaying ripe fruit of her breasts, by the promise of red slightly-smeared-from-that-kiss lips as she inserted a finger in her mouth and sucked on it and widened her eyes in an effect both comic and erotic. But I would be damned if I’d fuck her.
And I didn’t.
But to be honest with you, it wasn’t my sudden superior moral sense, not entirely. It had much more to do with the world going bleary and me passing out.
When I woke up it took me a full minute at least to get my bearings. I was groggy, a mental thickness cut only by the blinding blade of a headache. I sat up and tried to recognize the surroundings. The lights were low, only a desk lamp on and the shape of a man, a big man, seated behind the lamp’s glow.
“Are you feeling better, Mr. Heller?”
Bryant!
And this was Bryant’s office...
I was stretched out on the patient’s couch. My blazer was off and slung over a chair nearby. My mouth was cottony and my alertness was coming back but the headache had gone from a blade to banging. My right arm hurt at the joint. I got into a sitting position and my hands found my head as I leaned over, wondering if I was going to puke. Somehow I managed not to.
The fat man in the yellow sport coat, the red scarf loose around his neck now, came over into the dim desk-lamp light. He put a hand on my shoulder.
“You just take it easy now,” he said. “Marguerite called me, worried about you. You passed out, for some reason. With a man your age, why that could be a stroke!”