The Lesbian Pulp MEGAPACK ™: Three Complete Novels. Fletcher Flora
as a victim, but that Stella was kissing in return. That it was obviously something she wanted to happen, had helped to make happen. That it was something she liked. Her fingers were tangled in the man’s hair, drawing his head down to a hot, adherent contact of mouths, and her body was overtly aggressive.
Turning with a whimper, Kathy ran back upstairs to her bed. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, shaking with a chill that crept through her from a central core of ice, and she thought that she was certainly going to be sick to her stomach. She didn’t open her eyes when Stella finally came up and undressed for bed, and she kept them closed when Stella spoke her name.
It was all of a week before she opened her eyes and answered when Stella spoke.
CHAPTER 3
This was not the first morning she had awakened in the sour aftermath of the night before to the wish that she might never have to get up, to the regret that she had not died in her sleep. But always before, her depression had been a corollary of her personality, an element in a way of life that, if it never improved, might at least survive. Therefore, there was hope, and after a while the depression lifted and regret was abandoned.
Now there was no hope. She was damned, not for what she was, but for what she had done. She had killed. Murdered. In the tiny kitchen of a certain apartment, a man named Angus Brunn lay on the linoleum with an icepick penetrating his abdomen at an upward angle and perhaps puncturing his heart. He was dead, and she had killed him, and there was no way on earth to undo the act or its results, or to make anyone but herself responsible for it.
Soon someone would discover the body, probably before the day was out. It was possible, even, that the body had already been discovered—by a cleaning woman, by a friend, by anyone who might have had a reason for entering the apartment. If so, the intricate social machinery designed for the hunting of transgressors was already in operation. Men to whom murder was a job were converging on the house which had become a focal point because death had given it a sudden significance. And though it was almost incredible, this massive action which would, before it ground to its end, consume thousands of dollars and man-hours, was solely directed toward the detection and apprehension of a damned and frightened fragment of society just twenty-two years of age. Of her, Kathy Galt.
Lying in bed, reluctant to resume physical participation in a menacing world, she thought that it was a long way from ten to murder. A long, long way from a child with no hope to a woman who realized it. How long, actually? Twelve years? No more than a mere dozen years? How many days would that be? She tried to multiply it in her head, but she’d never had much of a head for arithmetic, and she lost her way between digits. It didn’t matter, anyhow. What mattered was that you could learn a lot in twelve years, a lot that should never have been learned. Even more important, you could fail to learn a lot that you should have learned. She wondered if, after all, it could really be reduced to such a splendid simplicity—the development of an adequate balance between a proper ignorance and approved learning.
Reluctantly, working back in reverse order of events, she began to examine again the disastrous night. She remembered the steps she had taken to remove all evidence of her presence in the apartment, but there might, of course, be evidence of a kind that she could not affect. Suppose, for example, that Angus Brunn had confided in a third person that he was cultivating a certain Kathy Galt. This wouldn’t actually tie her to the murder, but it would at least establish a relationship with Brunn. It would make her subject to an investigation which would entail consequences, quite apart from murder, that were unpleasant to contemplate. More than that, however, suppose someone had seen her entering the apartment with Brunn, or had seen her leaving later alone.
So she came by association to the cab driver. The one who had delivered Brunn and her to the apartment house from the night club. Whether the driver could identify her, or would come forward to do it even if he could, was something she couldn’t know. But he became an additional factor in the sum of terror, one more menace in a world that bristled with them.
She lifted her hands and, looking at them, retched suddenly. Sickness churned in her stomach, rose bitterly in her throat. The tips of the fingers of her right hand, she saw, were pink-tinged, and she remembered coming in last night, undressing and going to bed without washing or making any toilet whatever. The pink on her fingers was the stain of Angus Brunn’s blood. Bringing the hand closer to her eyes, she saw under the nail of the middle finger a dried shred of flesh. Two of the nails were torn badly near the quick.
Now she was really sick. Getting out of bed, she went into the bathroom and stood over the commode, leaning forward and bracing herself against the water closet. Her stomach heaved, forcing up the watery fluid that was all it contained. When the spasm had exhausted itself, she turned to the sink and ran it full of water as hot as she could bear. She lathered her hands and rinsed them several times and then stood for a moment longer with clear water from the tap running over them.
Standing there, her eyes caught the reflection of her face in the small mirror on the medicine cabinet, and she lowered them quickly to her hands under the running water. She hardly knew what terrible metamorphosis she had expected in her appearance, perhaps a gross distortion of features to symbolize depravity, but the unchanged slender face with rather sad eyes below a tangle of short brown hair, a childish face, really, was a genuine shock. Untouched by her inner corruption, it seemed to her the ultimate horror.
Her hands scoured, she returned to the bedroom and dressed. Her empty stomach ached dully, and she began to think longingly of the comfort of hot coffee. There was coffee in the kitchen, but she couldn’t bear the prospect of making and drinking it alone. It was necessary, now that she was in motion, to get out of the apartment at once. On the corner below the apartment house was a drug store where she could get both the hot coffee and the cold company of people. People could offer nothing to save her, or even to help her, neither compassion nor pardon, but they could at least hold back the silence and divert somewhat the destructive line of her thoughts. So, acting with decision, she left the apartment and walked down the street to the drug store.
There was a stack of newspapers on one end of the tobacco counter. She stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes and pick up one of the papers, and then she continued to the fountain. On a stool she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, and spread the paper on the imitation marble counter.
The young man behind the counter was wearing a starched white mess jacket and a starched white hat that was cut like a military overseas cap. The hat was cocked at such a precarious angle over one ear that it seemed about to fall off at any moment. His hair was heavy and blond and rather long, brushed around the sides of his head so that it met to form a little ridge, like two waves of water coming together, precisely in the center in the back. The only way a man could brush his hair to achieve such an effect, Kathy thought, would be to stand with his back to one mirror while he looked into another. It would take a lot of time and work to achieve such a precise effect. A lot of vanity.
“A cup of black coffee,” she said.
The young man looked at her and smiled. “Anything else? How about a breakfast roll? Fresh this morning.”
“No, thanks. Just coffee.”
“Doughnut? Hot cake?”
“Please. Just the coffee.”
“Okay, lady. Coffee coming up.”
He put a heavy cup on the counter at the edge of her paper and poured the coffee from a Silex.
“Ten cents, lady.”
“Oh…yes.”
She dug for the dime and slid it across the counter. Drawing the steaming cup over onto the newspaper under her face, she sat with her head bent and let the warm, moist fragrance rise up into her nostrils. It was a good smell, a reviving smell, a smell that prepared her a little better for the ordeal of the paper that waited her attention under the coffee. She drank a little, relishing the scalding descent into her interior, and then pushed the cup aside again, leaving no barrier between her and the symbolic ink, no last excuse for further procrastination.
She examined the paper carefully, her eyes moving column by column across