opening number, lifting one shoulder at him and then the other.
His eyes darted from her to the floor and back.
“Touch,” she invited.
He saw her mouth pout to whistle.
“Come on, it’s not cold,” she said. And whistled very softly.
He started back. “Jesus, Eve…”
She began thrusting with her hips, jiggling her bosom, but all very slowly and in time to the soft, soft whistle.
Then turned her mouth into a big, welcoming smile.
His hand reached out for her, but she swayed back, teasingly. To touch her, he would have to take another step forward. He looked at the foot of the dressing table, as if measuring the distance with his eye.
“What’s the matter, baby? Haven’t you got?”
And she imitated the rearing action of her other pet, spreading her hand like a hood, and laughing at how funny this was. Which rather shocked her.
“For Christ’s sake!”
He was pointing behind her. Clint must have peeped his head out.
“Oh, so that’s what turns you on? I’ve got one like a little apple!”
Old gags always found their uses. And she turned, standing now with her ankles together, and smiled at him over her shoulder. While tightening one thigh muscle and then the other, knowing this would make her bottom bunch and bounce.
Bunch and bounce.
He had to. He started toward her. She raised her arms slightly so that he could slip his hands around and cup her, squeeze her, grab her.
As his sweating palms brushed her sides, she bent forward and dragged Clint out by the tail so his underneath rasped on the floor. This hurt him and he hissed.
Behind her, kitchy-coo nearly fell over himself.
“Eve, for God’s sake, put it in the basket!”
She tugged at the bow on her bikini, removed the patches rather painfully, and confronted him again, with the python once more over her shoulders, hanging like a tape measure.
“Come-and get it,” she said.
“This isn’t-”
“ Ach, don’t keep Clinty boy waiting, baby-he wants to jump into his own beddy, too.”
“And-”
She nodded at the divan.
“All clothesy-wosies neatly folded.”
His dilemma was a knockout.
Up went the hands to his bow tie, but Clint’s head followed the movement, and they dropped away, shaking. She managed to get a hand to the basket and flipped back its lid. He started to tug his clothes off and a shirt button went ping against the wash basin without him noticing because he never took his eyes off her. Not once.
“I’m ready!”
“Look, Clint,” she giggled.
He glanced down at himself, over the slight potbelly, and saw nothing was happening.
“Oh, Jesus…”
“You’ll just have to show him, Clint, won’t you? Or Eve’s going to be a very frustrated lady.”
The python went into the routine as if he knew it, but took his cues from the light touches she gave as her fingers fluttered and fondled. Clint was really a very, very dumb animal, but all the more lovable for it.
“It must be the snake!” he said. “This has never-”
“You’re not impotent, are you, my sweet? Not leading a girl on for nothing?”
“Perhaps it’s because I’ve never thought of you this-”
“Do I remind you of your mother?” She laughed.
There was the gleam again.
“What you’re doing to me isn’t bloody funny,” he pleaded.
His additional little problem had not been part of her plan- it was possibly as much of a surprise to her-but it was well worth cultivating. She brought Clint up from the front way, taking ages over it and watching its effect.
She must have overdone the last bit, because the problem suddenly disappeared.
“You’re really ready, then, my sweet?”
“ Eve,” he begged in a whisper.
“Let’s make it an orgy, hey? The three of us?”
She had also dropped her voice very low.
“Please! I’ll pay anything. Just-”
That was the moment.
“Pay? It’s free! Come on!”
He stepped urgently toward her, stopping short.
How she laughed. Rocked and wheezed and pouted kisses. Laughed and laughed. Very softly, laughed and laughed. Staggered a little, too, and had to wind Clint once around her neck for him to stay aboard. Which brought on a coughing fit.
“Whore!” he snarled at her.
“Worm!” she retorted.
“I want!”
“I don’t-not with you, baby.”
“I will!”
“No, you bloody won’t!”
All this in whispers still.
“You think I’m scared?”
“Huh! I can see you are!” And she stuck out her tongue at him.
Pa had always cautioned that one day she would go too far with one of her acts. Do something to a man she wouldn’t believe possible.
Or upset a snake so much it would forget its manners and be forced to take advantage.
As she lay strangling in a scarlet hurricane on the floor of the dressing room, she had to agree, for the first time in her life, that the no-good old drunkard had been right about one thing.
Then her top plate fell out and she grimaced up at the ceiling like a Halloween lantern. One in which a candle guttered briefly before the pumpkin turned a dull rust color, all mottled and nasty.
2
Monday morning in the morgue was hell for some, heaven for others.
The NCO normally in charge, Van Rensberg, was on sick leave after an industrial accident-as the compensation papers called it-that had given him septicemia, and his place had been reluctantly taken by Sergeant Jacobus Kloppers, recently returned from Rhodesia’s northern border.
Kloppers was having adjustment problems. First to the idea of being out of the firing line, which he had secretly not enjoyed, and then to the fact that his previous billet had been usurped by a Jew. He wasn’t particularly anti-Semitery, or whatever the word was, but it remained inescapably the Jewishness of the bloke that was causing the trouble. It didn’t seem long since he had seen a story in the papers saying, FIRST JEWISH RECRUIT GRADUATES AT POLICE COLLEGE, and now Trekkersburg had one all to themselves, with more press pictures to prove it. JEWISH CONSTABLE IN CHARGE OF BOOK OF LIFE, said the headline on a clipping his wife had posted to him, while the caption had been a lot of rubbish about loving your country whoever you were. But seeing that all
