The Red Scare Read online

  I sat there stupefied for a moment, fingers choking the steering wheel. The yellow cab was already turning left on to Wisconsin Avenue by the time I gave my dazed head a shake and goosed the engine with gas.

  The cab swung neatly in and out of the noonday traffic, and then pulled up to the kerb in front of the State Department Building. Constance popped out and pranced over to a dumpy, dour-looking woman dressed in various shades of brown, from her headscarf to her shoes. She touched Mrs Brown’s elbow, and the woman came alive like a wind-up toy, her moon face splitting a grin and her horn-rimmed glasses sparkling.

  The two women hot-footed it on down the crowded sidewalk for two blocks, then slipped into a small corner restaurant. I managed to muscle my way into a parking spot across the street, and there I squatted, keeping watch. There was no point in going into the eatery – Constance had looked just as brunette coming out of her building and the cab in real life as she had in her posed pictures. And Mrs Brown didn’t look like any touch-up artist. What I was tracking for was a pit-stop at a beauty salon. Tailing had never been more attractive.

  Constance wrapped up her luncheon with the lady in brown just before one, then jumped into one of the cabs out of the pack of six that leapt at her on the sidewalk when she held up a slender hand. The taxi journeyed on out to the Pentagon, stopped about a block past the huge, five-sided Defence Department building. In front of another stout, secretarial-looking, middle-aged woman. Except this one was dressed entirely in formless grey, like a Chinese party official, with a grey tam where her starred cap should’ve been.

  Mrs Grey and the vivacious Constance piled into the cab and were whisked off to a café in the Watergate complex. If Constance was putting away the food, she certainly wasn’t packing on the pounds – except where it counted, of course.

  I idled around for an hour or so kerbside, checking for meter maids and my Constance. Finally, she and her dowdy companion at last exited the café and entered another cab, drove back to the Pentagon, where Mrs Grey was discharged onto the sidewalk.

  The taxi then sped away, to the Capitol Building. The time was just after 2.30, the personage this time around a pleasant-looking older woman garbed in a black coat and pillbox hat. Constance picked her up, and the pair was deposited in front of a diner three blocks over.

  While Constance’s luncheon schedule apparently extended all over town, I wasn’t getting anywhere. The woman was a vision of sexiness getting in and out of the cabs, strolling in and out of the dining establishments; her hair fading not a bit. As much as I admired the view, though, I was getting paid for results.

  So I nosed my Chevy out into traffic and drove the distance back to Constance’s abode, deciding to take a more direct approach to the matter of frosted-or-not follicles. Her nametag, in flowing script, was carded next to the buzzer labelled 304. I caught the door on a departing dirty old man who stopped to admire my somewhat voluptuous feminine physique in my masculine attire, and then I climbed three red-carpeted flights up. The lock on Constance’s apartment door was just one notch better than a latch. I popped it open with the third skeleton key in my brown leather keyholder, slipped inside the woman’s home.

  Breaking and entering is always on the menu for my meal ticket. The PI biz is highly competitive, especially in the capital of secrets – Washington, DC. I’m sure that’s what Adele was counting on. Fortunately, most of the homes, offices, cars, and hotel rooms I illegally enter belong to people with illicit activities of their own to hide, so I seldom get prosecuted.

  Constance’s nest was a one-bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchenette job, with flower-wallpapered walls and hardwood floors, light fixtures and radiators left over from the turn of the century. The furniture was minimal and nondescript, as befitted a woman on her way up; the contents of the refrigerator sparse, as befitted a model. I helped myself to a glass of grapefruit juice and then wandered down the short hallway into the bathroom.

  Clean, with old-fashioned black and white tiles on the floor and walls and a claw-foot iron tub with shower attachment. The towels were pink and smelled sweetly of woman. I set my glass down on the sink and cracked the medicine cabinet open up above.

  The usual assortment of feminine beauty, bathing, and blotting products – and a couple of bottles of brown hair dye. Bingo! It looked like Adele’s apprehensions had some basis in reality; either that, or Constance was worried about going prematurely grey. There were a few ways to confirm one or the other for sure.

  I picked up the pink comb from the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet and gave it a tine-by-tine search. Clean as a surgeon’s fork, unfortunately. I delved a digit into the drain, came up empty, repeated the spelunking process down the tub drain, came away dry again. Either this girl had a cleaning fetish or super-strong strands that just didn’t want to shed her head, or both.

  I crossed from the bathroom into the bedroom, eyes peeled for hairbrushes, and other exciting Constance intimates. Her bedroom was as pedestrian as the other rooms – an iron-railed cot sporting a beige blanket and a pair of white pillows, one blondewood nightstand with lamp and phone, a three-tiered blonde chest of drawers with mirror on top, and a small closet.

  I could’ve been ogling any modestly-priced hotel room in the Washington area, complete with hissing cast iron radiator. But I walked over and yanked the top drawer of the dresser open, and things got interesting again.

  There was a hairbrush lying in there, all right, amongst a silky, sensuous assortment of panties, bras, and stockings. My eyes went wide and my heart thumped burlesque. I plunged my dampened hands into the pile of close-contact body garments and washed around in the frilly girl-froth, a dreamy smile adorning my trembling lips. Then I gathered my quivering mitts together and scooped up two handfuls of silk, satin, and nylon, and bent my head down and bathed my face in the wispy bundle.

  I thrilled at the slick, soft, warm feel of Constance’s scanties on my burning red skin, caressing my forehead and cheeks and lips. My head spun and my nostrils sucked in body scent.

  I stood there, bent over with my faceful of feminine underwear, for a good, pussy-palpitating minute or so, revelling in the erotic feel all of those girly garments that clung to Constance’s breasts, pussy, and legs so closely, wishing in my addled mind that I was one of them, becoming one with the succulent woman’s body. Until, finally, I had to jerk my dizzy head back just to breathe. My body trembled with wanton emotion.

  I tumbled the finery back down into the drawer, and then reached out a shaking hand and picked up the hairbrush. It was as clean as an unblown whistle, like the comb and the drains – except for one fancy-free follicle.

  I carefully plucked the last strand standing out of the brush and held it up to the light. It appeared auburn, maybe even red. I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and bedded the hair down, returned the treasure to my pocket. The microscope back at my office just might break this case wide open.

  In the meantime, I went on exploring, leaving no drawer unturned. I yanked the middle one open, and my glassy eyes popped and my dry mouth watered. This wide shelf was neatly divided between skirts and blouses at one end, sex toys at the other. Dildos, dongs, and vibrators of all shapes and sizes and colours and a few different textures. I ran my quivering hands over the pussy pleasure devices, picturing in my fevered mind how Constance used them for her personal use.

  Then I was seized by another wicked idea – where there was smoke, there must surely be fire. Leaving the drawer hanging open like a panting mouth, I scampered over to the closet and played open on the flimsy accordion panels. I hit my knees, rummaged around at the feet of the saucy collection of high-heeled shoes and platformed pumps, found the plain cardboard box I was looking for.

  More sex toys, of an even naughtier nature. Feathers, fronds, leather straps, leather masks, handcuffs, nipple and pussy clamps, bits, bridles, spurs, riding crops, paddles, folded-up batons and coiled whips, a cat o’ nine tails. Apparently, Constance took her work home with her, the conscien
tious little minx. Or work was play, and always had been.

  I lifted the box out of the closet and dumped its dirty contents onto the bed, added the half-drawerful of pussy and clit stimulators to the lewd pile. I gazed down at the erotic mess, vowing to put it to good personal sexual use once my search was completed.

  I riffled through Constance’s hanging dresses, slips, and jackets in the closet. The garments ran the gamut from gingham innocence to full rubber mischief. The shelf up top was crammed with hats and scarves, the floor down below the ped-holders I’d previously encountered.

  I went back to the chest of drawers and bent down and tugged on the bottom one. It budged maybe an inch. It wasn’t stuck – something was holding it deliberately locked in place, for some reason.

  Senses tingling with more than just sex now, I stood up and levered the chest away from the wall a few inches. There were two chains looped through holes cut into the back of the bottom drawer on either side, secured to a pair of iron rings embedded into the wall at floor level, the chains locked in place with brass padlocks. The lady leaves her perverted pleasure and pain devices open to inspection by any pussy burglar, but feels the need to lock something else up?

  The question was: what?

  My palms grew clammy and my nipples buzzed like red lights as I scrunched down on my knees with my face to the wall and wedged my hands in between the wall and the drawer in back, my trusty skeleton keys dancing in my outstretched fingers. This lock-picking took longer, the tension building, my excitement mounting like Lady Godiva on steeplechase day.

  At last, I popped the padlocks open on both sides and pulled the chains free of the drawer. Then I scuttled back around in front and ripped the mystery shelf open.

  It wasn’t at all what I’d expected – a stash of hardcore film reels and pornographic books and magazines that told and showed all of the purple pleasures of Sapphic enrapture; or maybe a sister stash of illicit narcotics. No, it was a startling compendium of Communist pamphlets, leaflets, manuals, and coded message logs, complete with a Comrade Lenin quote sheet and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book writ large.

  It all spelled out revolutionary, as un-American anti-capitalist as beet-red borscht pie. Constance wasn’t just maybe a redhead; she was a sure enough Red!

  I gaped down at the tools of Cold War propaganda in dismay, my pussy sinking, my nipples shrivelling. Then I jumped as high as the Kremlin onion domes, went white as the Czarist forces at Tannenberg, when somebody suddenly said, ‘Looks like I caught you red-handed!’

  I swivelled and gaped.

  Constance Cumming was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, a small, snub-nosed .22 pistol clenched in her pale fist. Her pretty face was set grim, her perfect body in a black, form-fitting stretch-dress motionless.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I – I work for the building leasing agency,’ I told her. ‘I was just –’

  Constance thumbed back the hammer on her purse gun. The metallic click matched the one in my throat when I gulped.

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘I’m Megan McCarthy. I’m a private detective. Adele Katz hired me to find out if you’re a natural-born red – head.’

  Client confidentiality always went out the window in an emergency. Just ask any other dick.

  Constance’s lush lips curled up into a slight smile. ‘Uh-huh.’ She gestured with the lead dispenser. ‘Turn around, and put your hands behind your back.’

  I turned around, and put my hands behind my back. Her voice was commanding, as well as damn sexy.

  I watched her sidelong in the mirror, as she walked over to her littered bed and plucked a pair of fur-lined handcuffs out of the pile of play toys, her gun sights trained on my back all the way. Then she stepped over to me in her high-heeled black boots and slapped one of the furry rings onto my right wrist, snapped it shut, did the same to my left wrist, shackling my hands together; quick and professional, like she’d done it many, many times before.

  ‘We’ll just see if your story rings true,’ she breathed in my burning ear. Before walking back over to her bed and setting her gun down on the nightstand and picking up the telephone.

  I slowly turned to face her, as she dialled a number. The kinky lady was secure in the knowledge that her handcuffs could hold me, as they’d probably held other women in even more exciting situations. What she didn’t know about, however, was the key I keep in a special little sewn-in pocket in the back of my panties, just for occasions like these.

  When it comes to handcuffs, one key fits all. I’d wriggled out of plenty of possible police identification and interrogation tight spots with my snub little silver lock-opener. My fingers squirmed under the waistband of my slacks now and into the rear of my panties and gripped the key. I showed it some air behind my back, used it to snap the cuffs open with a dexterity that would’ve done Houdini proud in a pinch. All the while looking glumly at Constance with the phone receiver pressed to her pink, clam-shelled ear.

  She couldn’t reach the person on the other end of the line, whoever it was. And when she turned her eyes and body slightly to place the phone back down on the nightstand, I pounced.

  I dove right over the toy-laden bed like Johnny Weissmuller, latched onto Constance’s shoulders, and barrel-rolled over on the bed, taking the startled lovely down with me. We splashed about in the dildos and dongs and whips and cat-collars. Until my superior cougar strength and weight got the better of the mewling kitten, and I flopped over the top of her, quickly cuffed her wrists to the iron railings at the head of the bed.

  I stared into her widened blue eyes then, lying on top of her heaving, heavenly body. The whole encounter went from precarious to precious. I started enjoying myself all over again.

  ‘What say you answer some of my questions now, Constance?’ I breathed in the girl’s face, floating up and down on her warm, cushiony form.

  My breasts bobbed right along with hers, my pussy pressing into her pussy, our parted, wet lips separated by mere breathless inches. The heat was enough to melt the party identification of any card-carrying Commie.

  ‘Wh-what questions?’ Constance whispered, her eyes and lips shining, cheeks showing the colour her hair fanned out on the pillow probably was, her eyebrows arched innocently enough.

  ‘What’s with all the Red-baiting material – in your bottom drawer?’

  The tip of her glistening pink tongue darted out and bathed her glossy lips. I had to hold myself back from making a snatch at it with my teeth.

  ‘I … I don’t know about that.’

  I grinned like Uncle Joe. ‘Like heck you don’t. And I suppose all this lady-loving equipment just walked into your bedroom all on its own too? Never been used before, right?’

  Her face warmed even more at the mere mention of the sexual doo-moms we were wallowing in; her body heating up even higher, as well, under my flaming frame. But her tremulous lips didn’t tumble any confessions.

  That’s when an idea suddenly hit me, like a two-ton orgasm. I knew how I could make the naughty girl talk, heck, scream – spill me everything I wanted to know.

  ‘Won’t confess, huh?’ I teased. ‘OK. Well then, I guess I’ll just have to torture the truth out of you – sexually torture, that is. With your very own tools of the skin trade, Constance.’

  Her eyes beamed with banked fires and her nostrils flared with the smell of sex in the air. I swear to the Constitution I could feel her nipples harden and her pussy dampen against mine. I yearned to find out for sure.

  Constance bit her lip, keeping her tongue under wraps. I jumped up into the straddling position, bridging her waist, reached down and slowly rolled her black wool dress up her hot, white body. She wormed, whimpered, but I didn’t stop with the erotic unveiling until her dress was wound right up tight under her chin and above her armpits, exposing her amazing, curvy physique, the bulging red satin cups of her bra and her tiny red satin panties with the camel-toe indentation down in between her taut thighs.

  Th
en I lifted a swan feather up off the bed, the weight of portent slowing my movements. Constance’s eyes glittered frantic, her long lashes fluttering, her body twisting futilely beneath me. I dusted the girl’s vulnerable underarms with the tickling device, staring at the lush hills of her creamy-white breasts almost bursting her bra.

  She gasped and flung her head from side to side on the pillow, her body arching up against mine. But the handcuffs and my butt cheeks held her in place. I brushed the white feather lightly back and forth over the sensitive, glistening flesh of her armpits, riding her spasming body with my pussy.

  ‘Still won’t talk, huh?’ I rasped.

  I dropped the innocent feather, picked up something far more sexually menacing – a pair of silver, fur-inlaid nipple clamps. I placed them on the twin swells at the tops of Constance’s breasts in the straining bra. She stared up at me. I popped the bra open at the front. Her buoyant boobs burst into full blatant sight, swelling up and out right before my dazzled eyes.

  ‘No, please don’t!’ she implored. ‘You can’t!’

  I could barely hear her erotic entreaties, with the blood pounding away in my ears and clit. I fastened my damp hands around Constance’s ivory flesh-cones, cupping the heavy, heated breast-flesh. She closed her eyes and murmured, her pink nipples surging like my blood pressure. I clamped her engorged tit-tips with the cruelly pinching devices, and she bucked up off the bed, almost throwing me.

  Breathing even harder than her, I scrambled down to Constance’s quivering white thighs on my trembling knees. I hooked my fingers into the waistband of her wee panties and pulled down. That bewitching muff I’d mentally pictured in so many fantasies sprang up in front of me in full living colour – soft brown fur and pouty pink lips. I could smell its wetness, feel the heat radiating from it, just like in my lust-drunken dreams. In a trance almost, I picked up a foot-long purple dildo with a dial-setting in the base and poked the curved tip into Constance’s brunette pubes.