The Death of Lorenzo Jones
Read The Death of Lorenzo Jones Online
Authors: Brad Latham
and walked over to Sykes’s brown Nash. Sykes put the key in the door and was turning it when there was the crack of a rifle’s
firing that echoed through the walls of the stadium.
Lockwood grabbed at Amanda and they hit the ground. Then, he crawled over to Sykes.
Sykes was very dead. Blood oozed out of a bullet wound in his left temple that left his brains exposed. His eyes stared blankly
into the beyond.
Lockwood began to think that maybe Lorenzo Jones had been murdered after all. The rifle cracked again. Shards of glass flew
like schrapnel. Lockwood decided this was no time to theorize about somebody else’s untimely death. For the moment, he had
one driving, overwhelming need: to get out of this goddamn stadium alive!
Hook #1: The Gilded Canary
Hook #2: Sight Unseen
Hook #3: Hate Is Thicker Than Blood
Hook #4: The Death of Lorenzo Jones
Published by
WARNER BOOKS
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56610-0
Contents
1
“And you’re sure you left them on the dresser?” Lockwood asked her.
“You’re so persistent, Mr. Lockwood,” she said in a teasing way. She leaned over him now, and he saw almost all of her naked
breasts under the loose robe. The sight aroused him, but he pulled himself back to the job at hand.
“Miss Archer, Transatlantic isn’t going to pay your claim if you don’t answer my questions.”
“But I don’t like things to go by me in such a rush,” she said and gave him a mock pout. She moved from the dresser with its
huge vanity mirror toward the window, crooking her finger at him as she lowered herself onto the window seat.
“Come over here,” she said, “and I’ll answer any questions you might have.”
He sighed and followed her. Lois Archer had inherited $10 million when Mummy and Daddy had crashed in that Pan-American disaster
last year, and according to the
Daily Mirror
and other tabloids had spent all day and all night ever since struggling to rid herself of her fortune by burning the candle
at both ends. Last night some “beastly thief had made off with a pair of diamond earrings and a bracelet worth $10,000; Transatlantic
Underwriters had sent Bill Lockwood, its ace troubleshooter, to the Archer mansion on Fifth Avenue to see if he could find
the missing jewels.
“You sure you didn’t just put them in your sugar bowl in order to have something to play with this morning, Miss Archer?”
Lockwood asked as he sat down.
“Look at the view,” she said.
The Archer mansion looked out over Central Park, and September in the park was something—He felt her hands running up his
chest under his jacket.
“Hey, cut that out,” he said.
“Don’t you like to get a chest rub?”
He grinned at her. Why was he making it hard for her? Poor girl, twenty-six and cooped up here for an hour or two before she
had lunch at the Waldorf and tennis at Forest Hills and dinner at El Morocco. Surely Hook Lockwood didn’t have to disappoint
her need for a good time before lunch, did he? He scooped her up in his arms and gave her a long hard kiss.
When they broke, she gasped and smiled. “See, I knew you could! Hey, would you like to see the costume I’m wearing to the
Artists Ball tonight?”
“The Artists Ball? Costume?” What was with this dizzy broad anyway?
“It gets kind of wild,” she said. “It’s down in the Village, and every year we do wilder and crazier things.”
Well, it might get her off his back for a while so he could finish this investigation.
“Yeah, show me your costume.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me what you really think of it,” she said. “I don’t want you to say you like it if you don’t.”
He promised, and she went into the bathroom and closed the door. He went back to the dresser and then to the window. Only
one guy, Butch West, broke into houses this way, using a long screwdriver to pry open the top windows of Fifth Avenue mansions.
From the bath he heard the sound of buzzing. God knew what she was up to in there.
“Okay,” she shouted. “I’m coming out.”
He turned, and the creature who came through the bathroom door astonished him: Lois Archer wore not a stitch of clothing except
for black high-heeled shoes and an elegant rhinestone-studded mask that covered her face from her eyes up. Her figure was
long, lean, and trim: she had small breasts and her hips were a bit boyish, but the most astonishing thing about her was that
she had no pubic hair. Where women had at least the breath of fuzz, Lois Archer had nothing. Undulating saucily, she moved
toward him.
“Like it?” she asked.
“You’re going where in that?” he asked.
“The Artists Ball.” She grinned.
“How many people?”
“At least four hundred.”
“You’ll get arrested.”
“Nope. No cops there.”
He snorted and shook his head. “You must be kidding me.”
“Do you like it?” she asked in a concerned way, as if Lock-wood’s opinion was crucial.
He frowned. “Let me see how it fits in back.”
She spun around slowly and peeked over her shoulder with a worried look. “Does everything fit all right?”
“Fits fine.”
She turned back to him. “I shaved myself down there so the costume would be complete.”
“It’s complete all right. You can’t go to a public ball like this.”
“Now you sound like Daddy used to,” she said. “Last year I wore ten feathers, and a girl who came as a stripper, she got more
attention.”
Lockwood grinned. “What happens at these things?”
Her tongue flicked out of her mouth. “I’d rather show you than tell you.”
She came up to him and made him take her to dance with her. For a couple of minutes they glided around the bedroom floor.
He felt her hands caress his buttocks, and then she had stopped him and was massaging his aroused cock with her hands. Before
he knew what she was doing, she had unzipped his pants and his cock stood out at alert attention. With a loud “Ummm!” she
dropped to her knees and began to caress it and lick it and rub it with her cheeks. Christ, he said to himself, they can’t
really do this sort of thing at a public ball. He became more aroused; his cock disappeared into her mouth.
Before he came, she stood up and kissed him. “Now me,” she said, and before he knew it he was kneeling in front of her, looking
at a neat slit around which he could see just the faintest hint of shaved pubic hair. He licked the slit and she moved her
lips closer to him. He bore down harder. Lois moved against him.
“With your tongue!” she said, and he pushed his tongue up into her slit as far as he could. It tasted salty, but that excited
him still more. With a sudden whoop Lockwood picked her up and carried her toward the bed. Lois squealed delightedly. Her
mask fell to the side of the bed.
“Got you! Got you! Got you!” she said.
He threw her down on the bed, which she hit with legs spread. Her shaved pubis looked bald and raw, and she did nothing to
hide its full view from him. It seemed the work of seconds to get his clothes off, and then they were stretched out alongside
each other in the 69 position. Lockwood buried his face in her pussy, and he felt his cock disappear into a long dark soft
tunnel of caresses.
The phone rang. She groaned at the interruption, but neither of them stopped.
The phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing. Then it stopped, and they became even more involved in bringing each other
off.
The damn phone rang again.
Lois jerked away from Lockwood and snatched the phone off the cradle.
“What do you want?” she screamed. She listened for a second, then thrust the phone to Lockwood. “It’s for you.”
His mouth felt raw. Feeling somewhat sheepish, he slid across the bed and took the receiver.
“Lockwood, you get your ass back to this office this instant,” roared his boss, Mr. Gray.
“Sir?”
“I know what’s going on over there!”
“Sir?”
“Those jewels turned up at Stymie the fence’s shop this morning. I’m sure what you’re doing is screwing that scatterbrained
young heiress.”
“No, sir.”
“You get yourself to this office right this minute, Bill Lockwood, or you can join the victims of last year’s panic out looking
for work.”
After Lockwood hung up, he pulled his clothes together and started dressing.
“Hey, you’re not going, are you?” she asked.
“I got to. That was my boss.”
“Damn! I shouldn’t have answered it.”
He nodded glumly and pulled on his socks.
“Hey, aren’t you going to bring me off or anything?” she asked.
He sighed in weary disappointment. “Big new case. Got to get back. They found your jewels.”
Lewdly, she reached for his balls and gave them a gentle squeeze. “I know. They are right here.”
He continued to dress. All the while she didn’t bother to dress herself, just moved about in a provocative way.
“You’re really going to go?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He stood up.
“Before you go—kiss me.” Her eyes looked at, him with a kooky look.
He smiled. “I owe you that.”
“Kiss me, and hold me down there while you do.”
“Hold you?”
“Put your hand on my pussy while you kiss me, and rub me.”
Puzzled at her request, he agreed. She continued, “And don’t take your hand off or stop till I tell you to. Okay?”
He nodded, and they went into a long clench with Lock-wood’s hand covering her bush and three fingers half up her. She began
to shudder and buck beneath him so violently that he thought she might shake loose from his grasp. Then she lay limp in his
arms.
“I knew I was close,” she said with a weak smile. “Come back sometime, and I’ll do the same for you.”
He was tempted to stay. But all he could do was grin and say he would call and bolt out the door on the run to get to the
office.
Damn the telephone! Damn Mr. Gray! Damn Transatlantic Underwriters!
2
When Bill Lockwood, chief investigator for Transatlantic Underwriters, came into Mr. Gray’s office, he thought it was for
a bawling out.
After all, the company had only recently and reluctantly paid on three cases assigned to Lockwood. No reason not to, for the
investigations had proved no fraud was involved. But Gray hated to pay, even if the claim was legitimate. And Gray, damn him,
was probably going to bitch about these cases again.
On the way down the RCA Building’s corridor Lockwood decided that he wouldn’t take it, he would be just as gruff. Still, it
could mean his job, and Lockwood didn’t like the idea of hunting for a new one, not in these times after the ‘37 Panic.
Behind the frosted glass sat a surprisingly quiescent Gray, dapper in his ancient sort of way in a plain brown worsted with
his pince-nez on, squinting as he read some papers. At least he looked calmer than he had sounded on the phone.
Gray sat in his office like a spider waiting for a fly. His suit certainly was borrowed from a funeral parlor. Lockwood saw
Mr. Gray as a person with all the warmth of Boris Karloff in
The Mummy
.
Lockwood approached the spider’s desk. He tried to wipe the frown from his face as he sat down.
“Bill, I have a case for you.”
Oh no—Gray only called him Bill when he figured that Transatlantic would lose some loot.
“A little case really, should take no time to clear up. A definite fraud, no doubt about it. An ‘accidental death.’ The victim—a
baseball player, not anyone important really—was obviously murdered for his insurance. You go out and prove that the company
doesn’t have to pay on the policy. Prove it’s murder or suicide, so long as it wasn’t an accident. As long as we don’t pay.”