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A Dan Diamond mystery by j.

Doesn’t it always seem that just about the time you’ve come up with a simple explanation for some complex situation, something turns up that creates a whole new set of complications?

After my little talk with Billy Barstow in New Orleans, I was convinced that Suzanne Smythe’s story about the “death threats” was phonier than a Florida election. I was going to go ahead and check out Matilda’s sister Connie in San Francisco, but I didn’t expect to learn anything. I figured that Suzanne was either a nut case or had reasons of her own for sending me on a wild goose chase. Then something happened that changed my mind.

When my plane from New Orleans landed at LAX, I called Stella at the office to tell her that I was going straight home from the airport. I asked her to book me a flight to San Francisco for the next day.

“Okay, boss,” she said, “but before you hang up, I’ve got to tell you that I think I did something wrong.”

“Put that on hold, Stella,” I told her. “We can get back to the ‘I’ve-been-a-bad-little-girl’ routine when this case is wrapped up. Right now, I’m way too tired to come down there and give you a spanking.”

“No, boss, I’m serious this time,” she said. “That Billy guy called from New Orleans and said he had to talk with you. He said it was real important, so I gave him your home number.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You did the right thing. See you tomorrow.”

I couldn’t imagine what Billy wanted, unless he’d found out that Connie wasn’t working at the Spitfire Club any longer. I had stuck his phone number in my billfold, so I decided to call him before I left the airport. He answered the phone immediately. I couldn’t hear any screams of pain or orgasmic moans in the background, so I figured he wasn’t in the middle of a session.

“Hey, Billy,” I said. “It’s Dan.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m glad you called back, because I think there’s something you need to know. After you left last night, I went to work at the club. This big guy came in and was asking about you and what I’d told you. Matilda and I had smoked a few joints before we came to work, and I wasn’t thinking too clear, and I told the guy you were looking for Connie. And I told him where she worked.”

“Don’t worry about it, Billy,” I said. “But thanks for letting me know.”

“No problem, man,” he said. “And be careful, Dan. He was a really big guy, and he didn’t look happy.”

A really big guy? The first person I thought about was Joey Balls, but Joey was still sidelined by those broken kneecaps and, anyway, I had no reason to think he was involved with Suzanne. But the news that someone was on my tail bothered me a little, and I decided to run by the office so I could pick up my gun. I had never carried that gun — I’d never even fired a practice round — and it had a permanent home in my desk drawer. Now, maybe I needed it.

When I got to the office, I was starting to open the door when I heard the unmistakable smack of a hand landing on a bare bottom. I waited, and the smacks continued. It looked as if Stella had found someone else to warm her behind. What the hell, I thought, who needs a gun? Let Stella have her fun. I turned and went back down the stairs. I was getting into my car when I noticed two guys sitting in a black BMW parked across the street. They were staring at me, but when they saw that I’d spotted them, they looked away. Your garden-variety thug doesn’t usually drive a BMW, but this was L.A. Anything was possible.

I decided to see if they’d follow me when I left, but I didn’t want to lead them to my apartment. Philippe’s is only a couple of blocks from my office, so I drove over there and went in for a sandwich. They say that the French dip was created at Philippe’s, but I’ve never been too crazy about their version. I’ve had a lot of better ones in the Midwest, where people are serious about their meat. I like the place, though, with the sawdust on the floor and the long rows of tables and the mixed bag of customers. I ordered the French dip anyway. When in Rome, etc.

I hadn’t noticed the BMW tailing me when I got out of the car at Philippe’s. Maybe those guys went up to my office? When that possibility occurred to me, I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin, stuck it in my coat pocket and got back to my car in a hurry. I drove the two blocks back, ran into the building and up the stairs, and threw open the door to my office.

“Hi, boss,” said Stella, giving me a big smile.

The smile was the only thing she had on. She was lying naked across the knees of the person who’d been spanking her, her red bottom pointing at the ceiling and her hands and feet on the floor. Stella didn’t seem at all embarrassed, but the girl with the knees looked as if she wanted to hide under the couch. I recognized Stella’s friend Heather. I’d met her a couple of times, but I’d never seen her stripped down to bikini underwear. She looked good that way.

“I don’t know what to think about this, ladies,” I said. “This is a business office. It’s not the place for this kind of thing.”

Stella saw where I was headed, and she played along with the gag.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “It won’t ever happen again.”

“It’s a little late for that,” I said. “You can take your stuff out of your desk and get out. I’ll mail you your last check.”

“Oh, please don’t fire Stella!” cried Heather. “It’s all my fault.”

“You mean that you talked her into this?” I asked.

“Well, not, you know, exactly,” Heather said, fumbling for words. “But she wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t have been for me. Please don’t fire her!”

I stood there a moment as if I were trying to decide what to do. I shook my head sadly.

“I don’t think I can just forget about this,” I said. “You girls deserve some kind of punishment. Since you like spanking so much, I think I’d better give both of you a paddling you won’t forget.

“Oh, no!” said Stella. “Not that!”

She was overacting, but I think Heather was too scared to notice. She took a deep breath.

“Okay,” she said, “I don’t want to do that, but if you promise not to fire Stella, I guess it’s okay. We were doing something we shouldn’t have.”

“I think it’s best,” I said sternly. “It will be a very important lesson for you.”

Stella got up from the floor, where she’d been sitting since sliding off Heather’s lap. She turned her back to me, bent over and grabbed her ankles. Reluctantly, Heather got up off the couch and bent over beside her.

“The underwear has to come off,” I told her. “I want to spank your bottom, not your panties.”

She stood up straight and looked over her shoulder at me with a stricken look on her face. You’d have thought I asked her to do a striptease for the Pope, her mom and dad, and a reunion of her high school graduating class.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can,” I said.

She slowly pulled down the panties and stepped out of them. I could see Stella’s bent-over body shaking, and I knew she was trying desperately to hold back her laughter. Heather bent over again next to Stella, and two tight little assholes were staring me in the face. There wasn’t a trace of hair around either of their pussies; they were both shaved clean. It occurred to me that they might have taken turns shaving each other, and the thought hardened the growing erection in my pants. I slapped Stella’s bottom and then Heather’s. Stella wiggled, Heather said, “Ow!” I smacked them both again.

“Wait a minute!” Stella said. “This isn’t fair! Heather had been spanking my bottom for a long time and I’m already sore.”

“So?” I said.

“So I ought to get to spank her for a while before you start on us,” Stella answered.

Heather looked over in surprise at Stella’s lowered head. I didn’t answer for a moment, as though I needed time to think about it.

“Well, I guess that is the fair thing to do,” I said. “You’d better do that.”

“Hey!” Heather said, standing up.

“That’s what’s right,” Stella said, jumping up and leading her friend over to the couch.

She sat down, pulled Heather down across her lap and started slapping her bottom. Heather’s legs kicked violently, but she stayed in place across Stella’s thighs. Her bottom got redder and redder as Stella kept spanking her. Her legs stopped kicking, and she began moaning. Stella ran her hand between Heather’s legs. As the moans grew louder, Stella’s fingers got busier. Heather quivered and shook, and Stella suddenly dumped her off onto the floor. She sat there looking up at us in surprise.

“What?” she said. “What are you doing now?”

“Now I guess we give the boss a blowjob,” Stella said.

Heather looked so shocked that Stella couldn’t hold back the laughter any longer. She fell back on the couch and howled. I started laughing, too, and Heather finally caught on.

“Okay, I get it,” she said. “This is some kind of joke. But it’s not very funny.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” Stella said between bursts of laughter.

Heather looked angry for a few more moments, and then she began laughing, too.

“You are such a bitch, Stel,” she said. “I owe you one.”

Stella slid off the couch and began wrestling with her friend. She was trying to kiss her all over her face, and then she tried to put her tongue in her mouth. Heather struggled for a while, but it wasn’t long before she started kissing back. I figured it was time for me to leave. I don’t think they even noticed when I shut the door quietly behind myself.

That evening, I got an erection every time I thought of that little scene. It was even hanging around as I drove to the airport the next day. During the flight, I put a magazine over my lap and rubbed my semi-hard-on every now and then through my trousers.

When I’m in San Francisco, I like to stay in this tiny hotel on Washington Square Park. It’s next door to a great restaurant, and you can walk across the street to the park in the morning and watch the Chinese folks doing some kind of martial-arts exercise and other people helping their dogs find a place to poop. Catty-cornered across the square is the big, white, medieval-looking church where Dom DiMaggio and his brothers, Vince and Joe, supposedly were altar boys. Dominic was my father’s favorite DiMaggio, because Dad loved the Red Sox and hated the Yankees. He used to go around the house singing, “He’s better than his brother Joe! Dom-in-ic Di-Magg-i-o!”

The hotel was also convenient because this North Beach neighborhood wasn’t far from the address that Billy had given me for the Spitfire Club. After I checked in, I had a lot of time to kill, so I went for a walk. Despite all the hills, North Beach is a great place to wander around if you avoid the tourist hordes along the Embarcadero, especially at Pier 39, which is really just a tacky shopping mall with seals and seagulls.

I walked all the way up Telegraph Hill to take another look at the WPA murals in Coit Tower. They’re not great art, I suppose, but I like the idealized depictions of farm workers and fishermen and busy offices. They remind me a little of Diego Rivera and the other great Mexican muralists. My favorite is the one with the two shy girls sitting at the counter in a diner, one of them peeking over the other’s shoulder. That made me think of Stella and Heather, and I took a hard-on with me when I walked back down the hill.

I’d expected the Spitfire Club to be in an old Victorian mansion, like the ones on Nob Hilll, but the address on the courtesy card turned out to be a turn-of-the-century, warehouse-like building in the area where North Beach merged into Chinatown. It was well after midnight when I got there, but there were two groups of people in the little foyer waiting to get past the guy at the desk. When it was my turn, I showed him the card and he waved me in, requesting me courteously to enjoy myself. I told him I would. Promises, promises!

If the outside of the building didn’t look at all Victorian, the large room that I entered certainly did. It was scattered with overstuffed couches with ornately carved wooden legs and wooden trimming on the backs. There was a large ottoman in the middle of the room and a small bar along one wall. Pictures of nude women — as overstuffed as the couches — hung in gilt frames. It looked like an 1890s bordello, which was probably the way it was planned.

There were floor-to-ceiling columns at either side of the entrance door, and a naked man was tightly tied to one of them. His dick was hard and sticking straight out. Someone had hung a 49ers cap on it. He was gagged but not blindfolded, and his eyes swung wildly about as he watched the people entering. The first group just glanced at him, but the three women who came next stopped, and one of them lifted the cap from the man’s erection and put it on his head. They all looked down at his penis, laughed and walked on.
I nodded politely to the guy and strolled over to the bar. I ordered a Scotch and soda. There was no charge, but I tipped the bartender five dollars. There were a few people sitting on the couches, just talking, but the people who had preceded me into the club had gone on through one of the several doors in the rear wall. I followed them.

The place was a maze of rooms. There weren’t many people there yet, and no one paid any attention to me as I wandered around. The furniture in the rest of the place was more modern. I saw a couple of room with low couches, one of them with a fireplace. There were several bondage rooms, with lots of equipment, and a small auditorium with padded folding chairs and a stage with more bondage stuff. In one of the B&D rooms, two men were whipping a nude woman fastened to the wall by chains, but it didn’t look as if they were really getting into it. I think they were talking investments, probably some broker treating a client to an unusual night on the town.

I’d been walking around for about twenty minutes, trying to figure out what to do next, when a girl in a black dress that ended just below the curve of her buttocks came up to me.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you Dan?”

“In the flesh,” I answered.

“I’m Connie,” she said. “Billy called me about you.”

She didn’t look much like her sister Matilda, beginning with her jet black hair, though I suppose that either one of them could have had a dye job. She was also at least four inches shorter than Matilda. Still, she was very well put together, definitely not a girl you’d kick out of bed for eating crackers.

“Did Billy tell you what I wanted to talk to you about?” I asked.

“He told me a little bit,” she said, “but we need to go somewhere more private to talk. Let’s go into one of the bondage rooms.”

She led me down a couple of halls to a room that I hadn’t seen before. It was small, but there was a spanking bench, chains on the wall and the usual rack of whips and paddles.

“This is mostly a room for private sessions,” she said, “but the club rule is that anyone can come in and watch any session. We need to pretend like something is going on, so we’d better get undressed.”

She pulled off the little black dress and stood there in a black bra and panties. She was wearing thigh-high black hose, but they were held up by elastic tops, not garters. That disappointed me, because I had become a big garter fan. I quickly undressed down to my jockeys.

“Better take those off, too,” Connie said. “Everybody knows I’m a dom, so we’ve got to seem like I’m doing you. I’ll tie your arms up.”

I pulled off my underwear. She folded my arms behind me, one over the other, and tied the end of a rope around them. She kept wrapping the rope around my arms until they were entirely cocooned in rope. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to for a short conversation, and a little trickle of doubt began to run through my mind. The trickle turned into a cascade when two guys walked into the room. One of them was very large and very mean-looking.

“Hello, Mr. Diamond,” the smaller one said. “We meet at last.”

The guy looked as if he’d just flown in from a script meeting in Century City. He was well into middle age, but he was tanned and barbered and blow-dried. He had on a black designer T-shirt under an expensive black silk suit, and he was wearing lightly tinted sunglasses — after midnight.

“You know me,” I told him, “but I don’t know you.”

“That doesn’t matter right now,” he said. “What matters is that you’ve been going around asking questions about things that aren’t any of your business.”

I wasn’t in a very good position, standing there with my arms securely tied and my dick on display, with a 200-pound gorilla glowering at me over Mr. Hollywood’s shoulder. But sheer terror can make you brave sometimes — and I’ve always got a smart mouth.

“They’re my client’s business,” I said, “and if they’re her business, they’re my business. The last time I checked, that’s the way the world goes around. If they changed the rules in the last few days, they forgot to let me in on it.”

I had expected the guy to punch me or something, but he just sighed and shook his head.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into forgetting about those letters,” he said. “We could make it very worth your while, and I can assure you that no one is going to get hurt.”

“Sorry,” I said. “No can do.”

He shook his head sadly again.

“I guess we’re going to have to make you change your mind,” he said. “But I’m going to have the fine people here at the Spitfire Club do it for me.”

He nodded to Connie, and she took an elaborate metal gag off the paddle rack. It looked like something that a dentist would use to keep his patient’s mouth open. Connie put it in my mouth and did something to make it expand. My mouth widened grotesquely, and all I could do was make inarticulate sounds. Mr. Hollywood nodded to her again, and to my surprise, he and the big guy walked out of the room.

Connie knotted a rope around my balls and pulled me out of the room, down the narrow hall and out into the main hall. There was a long round metal bar running down one side of the hall, and she tied the other end of the rope to that. Then she smiled at me and left.

I had no idea what was going on. The big guy looked like a standard-issue thug-for-hire, but Mr. Hollywood didn’t seem to fit. And why was Connie helping them? And why had they all gone away and left me standing there? And, most of all, what did I do now?

Three women came walking down the hall. They were the same ones who had stopped at the entrance to check out the guy with the 49ers cap hanging on his penis. When they got to me, they checked me out, too. I made noises at them, but it was no use trying to talk through that gag.

“This place is full of nice surprises,” one of them remarked.

“I think he’s trying to say something,” another one said. “See if you can take the gag off.”

The third one fiddled around behind my head for a minute.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “There’s some kind of little lock in back.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the first one said. “I’m not interested in having a conversation with him anyway. Let’s take him to one of the dungeon rooms.”

“Let’s!” the other two chorused.

They untied the rope from the bar and led me down the hall. They peeked into each door along the hall. When they found one they liked, they yanked me in. I wished they’d be a little more careful and remember where the rope was fastened, but I don’t imagine they were nearly as worried about my balls as I was. They pulled me up against the table in the middle of the room and bent me over it, with my torso lying flat on the table and my butt sticking out in the usual paddling position. Then they went over to the wall rack to choose their weapons.

They took a long time to decide, giggling over the wide variety of whips and paddles and a few instruments that baffled them completely. I failed to see the humor in the situation. One of them swished a cane through the air a few times, and the sound made my asshole pucker, but she put it back on the rack. I would have sighed in relief if my mouth hadn’t been stretched too far to even think of sighing.

When they finally turned back to me, one had a narrow leather slapper paddle, one had a riding crop and the third was carrying one of those big wooden paddles with holes in it that looked as if it came from some principal’s office. For one horrible moment, the image of Sister Mary Agnes flashed across my mind. But these broads were barely pushing middle age, and Sister Mary Agnes would have needed a wheelchair by now to make it to the Spitfire Club.

They stood there and looked at my bare bottom for a while, as though it were some exotic fruit or vegetable they were trying to figure out how to carve up. Then the one with the wooden paddle spanked me hard across both my cheeks, and the feeding frenzy began. They were all trying to swat me at the same time, which wasn’t really that bad, because they were getting in one another’s way. Half the time, they were hitting another paddle instead of my butt. If they’d gone at me one at a time, it would have been a lot tougher.
But it was tough enough as it was. I figured the ladies were new to S&M, and I guessed that there were some bad marriages and worse divorces and a dissatisfaction with the conduct of the male animal in general that were behind the blows landing on my ass. They were hitting hard, and my bottom was on fire. Finally, a couple of them either got bored or decided they were going a little too far, and they stopped. The third one — the one with the wooden paddle — swatted me a few more times, but she finally called it quits, too.

“Look how hard his thing is,” one said.

“Shall we get him off?” another asked.

“Let’s!”

They stood me up in the middle of the floor, making me spread my legs wide. One of them began to jack me off, yanking hard on my penis as though she were making sure it was securely attached. The other two watched for a while, but then one went around behind me and began slapping up between my legs with the leather narrow paddle. Though most of the blows landed on my anus and my taint, a couple of them caught me on the balls. She wasn’t hitting hard, but it was still very painful.

If I could have spoken, I would have told these broads that they were going about it the wrong way if they wanted to see me cum. I wanted to let them know that unless they were a little kinder and a little gentler and a lot nicer, nothing was going to happen. And then, to my astonishment, it did happen. Almost as soon as I realized that the orgasm was on its way, it arrived, and cum spurted out of my cock and almost hit the woman standing in front of me. She squealed and jumped back.

The one who was masturbating me kept jerking away until the most that my penis could manage was a few dribbles. The woman hitting between my legs didn’t stop, and one slap caught the edge of my balls. It brought me up on my toes. I hadn’t been thinking about starting a family, but any possibilities along those lines might have vanished forever if she hit me again with more accuracy. I was saved by a new voice in the room.

“Did you ladies know that the show was going on in the auditorium?” it asked.

They didn’t, but they were glad to find out. They hurried out of the room, and I was left standing there with this short, stocky, bald-headed guy.

“Amateurs,” he said in a disgusted voice. “You’ve got to watch them every minute.”

Like Mr. Hollywood, he was dressed in black, but instead of a suit, he had on leather trousers and a turtleneck. He wasn’t just bald on top; his head was shaved completely. He untied the rope around my balls, got a towel off a cabinet in the corner and began wiping the string of cum off the end of my penis. I’d never had my dick wiped by a man before, but there was nothing erotic in the way he went about it. He handled my penis matter-of-factly, as though he were working in a vegetable market and cleaning the cucumbers before the next customer arrived.

That made it doubly embarrassing when it hardened in his fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice or didn’t care. He finished, tossed the towel to the floor and told me to come with him. I went along obediently. I figured that this was not a guy to fuck around with. He led me to the auditorium, where a show was in progress on the stage at one end of the long room. At the other end, a waist-high metal rail ran down the length of the wall, like the one that I’d been fastened to in the hall. There were a couple of nearly naked women tied to the rail about ten feet apart, and he positioned me between them and fastened one of the ropes dangling from the bar to my crossed arms.

“I don’t know who you belong to, but they ought to keep better track of you,” he said, and then he walked out of the room and I never saw him again.

I stood there and watched as a girl on the stage had her butt beaten briskly and then skewered by a skinny guy with an extremely large penis. I don’t know whether she hated it or liked it, but she yelled a lot despite the ball gag in her mouth. The guy pulled out at the last moment and squirted cum all over her red bottom, and that seemed to signal the end of the show. Some of the audience members went onto the stage to have some more fun with the girl, who had been left fastened face down on the spanking bench. Others wandered back to where the two women and I were tied to the rail.

A group of four or five gathered in front of me. Some were women, some were men. I tried to stare over their heads and avoid meeting their eyes. They turned me sideways, so that they could inspect both my front and my rear. Fingers trailed across my buttocks, tracing the marks that the three women had left there earlier. Then there were hands on me everywhere, tugging and pinching my nipples, running down my back, fondling my penis, lifting my balls as though they were weighing them. A finger probed between my buttocks, and I was bent over so that it could continue its inspection more easily. The finger entered my anus.

“Tight,” a man’s voice said. “His owner might want to keep a butt plug in him for a while.”

“Come on, Jack,” a woman responded. “With a thing as tiny as yours, it doesn’t matter much, does it?”

Everyone in the group laughed, even Jack. If he got a kick out of the comment, his thing probably wasn’t that tiny after all. He withdrew his finger and slapped my bottom.

“Anybody got a paddle?” he asked.

One of the women pulled a small leather paddle out of her purse. It was only about six inches long and maybe an inch and a half wide, just the thing to carry around in case you were suddenly overcome by an urge to spank a butt or two. She handed it to Jack, who began to paddle me with a lot of energy. My erection bobbed violently up and down as my butt flinched under the blows.

“Don’t wear yourself out, Jack,” said the same woman who had spoken before. “You may have to use that on me before the evening’s over.”

Everyone laughed again, and he stopped spanking me. His wife reached out and began stroking my dick. I say his wife, but it could have been his girlfriend or his mistress or some business associate for all I knew. I just thought of her as Ms Wiseass. She held my penis between just two fingers and her thumb so that everyone could have a good view of it as she jacked me off. Jack was rubbing my butt while he watched, squeezing it occasionally.

It had been less than an hour since the three women got me off in the bondage room, but I was close to another orgasm already. I went off to that private place where all that registered was the feel of the woman’s fingers on my erection and the agony of pleasure building inside me. I had my eyes closed tightly, but I opened them when the cum began to pour out, and even in the midst of the intense orgasm, I was happy to see that the first spurt landed on Ms Wiseass’ dress. I’d like to see what they thought of that at the dry cleaner’s. She let go of my penis and stepped back, but it kept jerking by itself as the cum jetted onto the floor.

“You can hit him all you want now,” she said. “If I can’t get this off my dress, you can beat his butt off for all I care.”

My knees were weak from the orgasm, and they got weaker when I saw Jack tapping the little paddle against his other palm and eyeballing me with a smile spreading across his face. He looked like a Big Bad Wolf presented with a nude and helpless Red Riding Hood — and not a single woodchopper in sight.

“Excuse me,” someone said behind me.

I looked around. Matilda was standing there. My jaw would have dropped open if it hadn’t been already stretched wide by the gag, but then I realized that the girl wasn’t Matilda after all — she just looked amazingly like her. One of the evening’s mysteries was cleared up. This had to be Connie, Matilda’s sister. The woman who had claimed to be Connie earlier had obviously been an imposter, part of Mr. Hollywood’s weird plan, whatever that was.

“I’m sorry,” the Connie ex machina said, “but I’m afraid that this slave is required for a private session.”

She untied me from the bar, grabbed my penis and pulled me out of the group, out of the room and down the hall. Toward the end of the hall, she led me into a small side room with a single low couch. She fished a key out of the bra of her skimpy underwear and began working on the lock of my gag.

“Hi, Dan,” she said. “I thought it was you when I saw them leading you around naked, because Billy told me that your dick bent way to the left, like you did a lot of jacking off with your right hand. Then I overheard these two guys at the bar talking about how they were trying to shut some guy up, and I was sure you were you.”

She pulled off the gag, and I readjusted my jaw. It had been spread apart for so long that I’d been afraid it was permanently locked open. But it seemed to work. I decided to let her comment about my curvature pass and get down to more pressing matters while she was untying my arms.

“One of those guys was wearing sunglasses and the other one was a big thug, right?” I asked.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Do you who they are?”

“I don’t know the big guy,” Connie said, “but everyone knows Manny Bergeron. He’s an agent. He handles a lot of straight actors, but he’s also got a few clients in porn movies.”

“Do you know any of his clients?”

“Well, I guess the best-known one is Suzanne,” she said.

“Suzanne Smythe!” I yelled. “I knew that broad was trying to pull something! This story of hers about the death threats has to be pure bullshit!”

“Wait a minute,” Connie interrupted. “I’m not taking about Suzanne Smythe. Manny’s client is Suzanne Sachs.”

This was the big moment, the time in every case when the mystery evaporates and you understand what’s been going on all along, the time when the detective realizes what a stupid asshole he’s been. I know that feeling well.

I saw now how it all fit together. Suzanne Sachs was the fading move star who made the stinker “Hard Rock,” the film that Suzanne Smythe had parodied in “Hard Cock.” Suzanne — my client, that is — told me all about that the first time we met, but it hadn’t registered in my thick skull. The person who wrote the threatening letters wasn’t angry about the bondage shoots for the Internet. She was pissed off because of the porno film based on her movie.

“Suzanne Sachs must be the one sending those death threats,” I told Connie, who had finally finished untying me.

She stared at me with a puzzled look on her face. She had no idea what I was talking about, but someone else did.

“You figured it out, huh?” Manny Bergeron said.

He was standing in the doorway of the room, with his big friend peering over his shoulder. Manny didn’t look threatening. He just looked very weary.

“You’re going to have to name your price, buddy,” he said, “because I can see I’m not going to scare you off. How much were you planning to stick me for?”

“I’m a private investigator, not a blackmailer,” I told him. “I’m not going to walk away and leave a client in danger.”

“Suzy Sachs wouldn’t hurt anyone,” he said. “Some evenings, she has a few too many cocktails, and she writes some letters. The next day, she’s forgotten all about them. The only time she’s a danger to anyone is when she drives to the post office at 3 a.m. I’ve started having her maid hide the car keys at night, so even that doesn’t happen anymore.”

“If that’s the straight story,” I said, “no one’s going to find out about it from me except for my client.”

Manny stuck out his hand, and we shook on it.

“You better put on some clothes, buddy,” he said. “If you go around with your dick hanging out in this place, there’s no telling what might happen to it.”

I thought that was a wrap, but about a month later, I got a call from Manny at my office. Stella and I were busy discussing a case, but I made her get up from over my knees so I could concentrate on the conversation. She stood there rubbing her bare butt and pouting because of the interruption.

“Hey, Dan,” Manny said. “I thought you’d like to know that Suzanne Sachs has got her act together and has the lead in this hot new movie.”

“Good for her,” I said.

“Yeah,” he continued, “but there’s more. This flick is called ‘Dom,’ and it’s based on the life of your friend Suzanne Smythe. They’ve even hired her as a consultant. Those two broads are big buddies now.”

“Holy shit!”

That was about the most intelligent comment that I could manage. I was still in shock after Manny said good-bye, but Stella reached over and grabbed my dick, and then I had other things to think about for a while.

End of The Case of the Desperate Dom Story

COMING SOON: The Case of the Undercover Dick.

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