Chapter 28
I'm afraid that my usually glib tongue failed me as the two women came into my bedroom. Neither of the women said anything either. It was surreal as the three of us watched each other.
Belle unpinned her hat and took it off, then let down her long blonde hair. Maria wasn't wearing a hat, so she only had a couple of pins to remove to let the thick mass of her shiny ebony hair fall in waves down her back.
Once the women had their hair unbound, Belle turned to Maria and started undoing the fasteners on Maria's starched white blouse. Belle finally broke the eerie silence.
"We've been dying to see your breasts, Sweetie. They seem so full and firm to the touch."
Maria didn't seem to have any reservations about what was happening, as her only reply was a strained, "Hurry, Belle, I'm burning up inside."
Belle leaned in and kissed Maria as her agile little fingers made short work of the whale bone buttons. Maria shrugged off the blouse as Belle was already attacking the fasteners on her long black skirt. It didn't take long for the skirt and crinoline to join her blouse haphazardly flung across my reading chair.
When Maria was down to her cream-colored shift, the two women started on Belle's much more formidable outfit. Undressing Belle was akin to peeling an onion as one layer after another was removed. Dress, corset, petticoats and bustle joined Maria's simple outfit on the chair, until Belle was down to a silky camisole and lacy bloomers.
I still lay unmoving on the bed as I watched the incredibly erotic show the women were putting on. Well actually, one part of me was moving, as my Johnson tented the covers as if it were a Minuteman Missile leaving its silo. When the women made a move to shed their undergarments, I spoke for the first time.
"Let me take those off, it will be an early Christmas for me," I said.
Both women smiled and scampered over to me. I scooted over and Belle pushed Maria in next to me, then piled in herself. It was very cozy with three of us in the double bed. As soon as Maria was situated on her back, she pulled me towards her for a kiss.
"I've been waiting soooo long for this day, Tyler. I thought it would never get here," she moaned into my mouth.
I broke the kiss and started working her shift up her legs until I had it pushed up around her waist. Belle had started at the top and had the bodice pulled down also. Maria raised her hips and I finished pulling the cotton shift off her. Maria's body was even better than her clothes hinted it was. She was not skinny, but she was firm and taut as only a teenage girl can be. Maria's breast appeared to be bigger, yet they stood up proudly from her chest, even though she was lying on her back. Her areolas were a dusky brown and big as a silver dollar; her nipples were also large and swollen with her desire.
Belle and I had the same idea at the same time, as both of us swooped down to take one of her tightly crinkled, swollen nipples between our lips. It was obvious from that first minute that Belle and I were naturals as a team, as we worked in perfect synchronization to bring Maria's arousal to a peak. Belle stayed up north while I let my lips and tongue drift southward toward Maria's fragrant center.
Maria had, without a doubt, the sweetest tasting little pussy I'd ever been near. One lick and I was hooked. No wonder I had to practically drag Belle out from under our young lover's dress when we were down by the river last Sunday.
As I went to work, Maria demonstrated that she was as orgasmic as her sister and Abuela. Maria's high-pitched keening moan was cut off in mid-note as Belle drove her tongue into the climaxing woman's mouth. I had all I could do to hang on as Maria's hips shot up off the bed, her back arched in ecstasy.
I held on until Maria sagged back down onto the mattress, then I jumped up and fitted on a sheath from my recently renewed stockpile. Clem had given me a ration of good-natured ribbing about the number of rubbers I had bought from him, but occasions like today made it all worthwhile.
I climbed back on the bed and between Maria's soft smooth thighs as Belle watched me with feverish eyes. I used Maria's plentiful juices to wet the end of the sheath and worked the head into Maria's puffy little slit.
"Are you ready, Maria honey?" I asked.
Maria gave me a quick nod and pulled her knees back, so I gently pushed forward. Maria was a snug fit, but not overly tight. Her velvety smooth vagina gripped my rod firmly, but not unpleasantly. Maria moaned as I sank into her to the hilt, then started moving her hips and urging me to go faster. As excited as I was at being where I was, I happily obliged her. I managed to hold out just long enough for her to climax again, before I exploded as her internal muscles were doing the boogaloo on my one-eyed trouser trout.
Between Belle and Maria, that afternoon was the most erotic of my life. Belle was very aggressive and demanding with Maria and surprisingly, Maria seemed to love it. No matter what they were doing, Belle was always on top. Belle did get her wish of being taken while she and Maria sixty-nined. She also rode my face as Maria rode my staff.
I think that the love that seemed to be growing between the three of us is what made the experience so much better than the threesome I had while in Okinawa. After our love making, we snuggled up together and talked. Maria was all for moving in with us, provided that Belle could find a way to make it acceptable to her family. Belle, it seemed, was already thinking in that direction.
"Leave it to me, Sweetheart, it will take a few months, but I'll fix everything," Belle said.
Belle and Maria pulled themselves together and left me at five-thirty. Belle had Jose Colon, whom she called her coachman, waiting downstairs. She was taking Maria home and then joining me for supper at Molly's table. Belle had rented the single room next to my little apartment for appearance sake, so she was a resident with privileges now.
For the next month or so, my life bolted along like a runaway locomotive. I was now spending at least three or four hours a day at the El Paso Hotel as the carpenters finished trimming out one room at a time. As soon as a room was finished, Belle and I started decorating it. The first room completed was the small intimate dining room. I was working with a tight budget, but thankfully, I was able to pick up ten tables and forty chairs from the defunct restaurant where Miranda once worked. The furniture was in good condition and the price was right. Belle had the idea of painting two of the walls a deep royal blue to add to the intimacy of the space, and Naomi found some heavy brocade material the same color for the drapes.
What I had been calling the piano bar turned out to be much easier, as Belle bought her way into the partnership by leasing the room and insisting on decorating it at her expense. Belle was in love with the idea of owning her own upscale cabaret and being the featured performer there.
I had my first inkling about how well off Belle actually was, when I brought up the lease deal that night as we lay in bed. The lease alone was three grand up front for three years, and Belle was talking about spending at least that much again on decorating the place. For her initial investment, Belle would keep seventy percent of the bar's profits and become a one seventh partner in the El Paso Gentleman's Club.
"Belle honey, I hate to see you put yourself out on a limb like this. If it will help you any, I have eight hundred and fifty dollars saved up that you can have until your bar starts making money," I said.
Belle rolled on top of me and kissed me.
"You are so sweet, Ty, but you are forevermore dense sometimes. I've told you repeatedly that money is not a problem for me. Besides, I consider the bar and club as a whole, a good investment. My daddy says that money, that makes money, is well spent."
I shrugged and promised not to mention it again. Of course we both knew that it was a promise I'd have trouble keeping. I fretted about money quite a bit, because I had long-term plans for every nickel I could save. I could understand Belle's reticence when it came to talking about whatever money she had. In 1877, a woman had about zero property rights; in fact, once she married, everything a woman owned became the property of her husband.
I still had my regular job at the Cantina del Toro. I was going to work there until a week before we were ready to open for business at the new club. I still gambled some and performed a few songs every night, but I mostly let the Hombres and Belle take care of the entertaining. I was much busier now, because we were still drawing good crowds every night.
I was also handling one or two criminal defense cases a week, mostly representing Mexicans who had a poor command of English. It was during the last week of July that I lost my first case, a fact that was made more galling because the man was clearly innocent. Seeing my client led off in shackles, headed for Brownsville for three years for stealing a cow brought me low.
Around the same time, I received my first assignment as a Deputy U.S. Marshal. I received a packet from Marshal Cahill that contained a federal warrant for an Army deserter thought to be hiding out across the river in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It took me only two days to track the man down. He wasn't all that hard to find, as there aren't that many huge black men with bald heads running around Eastern New Mexico. His name was Leviticus Romney.
I found him shacked up with this incredibly beautiful Apache woman. I believed him when he said it was love that caused him to desert. Hell, I'd have been tempted to do the same thing in his shoes. But of course, that conversation only happened after he and I engaged in a serious bout of fisticuffs. Romney was big and strong, but I was a cop's son, and had boxed my way up through the Golden Glove ranks with the Police Athletic league.
El Paso and Juarez, Mexico in the nineteen fifties and early sixties were a hot bed of boxing talent as Mexican kids in the lower weigh divisions trained and fought with an eye towards turning pro. Guess which big dumb Mick provided target practice for those hummingbird-quick, hard hitting little dudes? If you guessed good old Tyler McGuinn, you win the prize. I don't think I won a dozen fights in five years, but I sure learned how to fight defensively. As a result, even though Levi had a punch like a mule's kick, he mostly only connected with air and my arms. I did the Mohammad Ali rope-a-dope trick until he had punched himself out, then I put him down for the count and slapped the hand irons on him.
I took sadsack, lovesick Levi back to El Paso, and parked him in Sheriff Faulkner's jail. I telegraphed Cahill so he could let the Army know where to pick the man up to return him to military control, and went back to work at the saloon.
On the first of August, we started selling memberships to the El Paso Gentlemen's Club in advance of our projected September the first grand opening. We had set an arbitrary limit of two hundred members, and hoped to sell fifty memberships before the club opened. We set the price of membership at one hundred and fifty dollars a year, paid in advance. That was a hefty sum of money, but it was also a selling point, in that the steep cost guaranteed the club's exclusivity.
We invited the movers and shakers of old El Paso to tour the facilities, and Belle and I gave our sales pitch. By then, I'd begun adding a few refinements to the club, including a sauna, bathing pool and massage rooms that were being built out by the bathhouses. I had to hit the partners up for an additional five hundred dollars each to cover the new additions, but everyone agreed that it was a good investment. I made sure they thought that by arranging an oriental massage for each of them. The massages were given by Mister Huang's wife, Ling, and his daughter, Prudence. I hired his son Robert to run the sauna and massage operation, and Chong promised me he'd have me two masseuses from San Francisco by the time we opened.
I was gratified and much relieved that memberships sold like hotcakes. We had over a hundred members before we even opened the doors to the place. In the process of signing up new members, I met the elite of El Paso from both sides of the river. Having Belle with me when I was giving the tours made selling the memberships easy. When Belle turned on the charm, it was hard for any man to say no to her.
The infusion of capital from the sale of memberships more than paid for outfitting the game room with a couple of deluxe billiard tables, plus some nice tables and comfortable chairs for card games. The money also bought the furniture and some books for the library. I also solicited donations of books from the partners and new members. Before you know it, I had over six hundred volumes in the floor to ceiling bookcases. I was inordinately proud of that library, with its over stuffed chairs, three writing desks, and dark wood paneling.
Prominent in the center of the room was a table with a chess board inlaid in the top. My friend the used furniture dealer across the river sold me the table, matching chairs and an ivory and jade chess set for seventy-five dollars.
Yes I was working my ass off, but before you start thinking poor, poor pitiful me, I have to tell you that the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August of 1877 were not all work and no play. That was far from the case, because Belle never let there even be a hint of sexual deprivation in my life. Besides trying to fuck me into ill health herself, Belle managed to bring Maria around at least once a week.
We also spent an afternoon a week with Naomi Singleton. Naomi turned out to be everything Belle had thought and then some. Naomi loved going down on Belle and spent a lot of time between her thighs when we all got together. Naomi said that she developed a taste for women when she was a young dancer and one of the other women seduced her. She hadn't been with a woman in a while, because she wasn't aggressive in pursuing them as Belle was. Naomi was very talented with her tongue and Belle was the kind of dominating woman she went for, so it was a good fit for everyone involved. Typically, the two women would double team me until I was exhausted, then Belle would put Naomi through her paces as I watched.
Needless to say, life was good for old Tyler.
One person I didn't see much of during that month was Feleena. Feleena was spending most of her time with George Howard. Their torrid affair was the talk of Sin City. It did not bother me that Feleena was with another man, but I had some concern for her well being, because that man was Georgie Boy Howard. I told Belle about my concern. I tried very hard not to keep anything from Belle. I did that not only because it was the right thing to do, but also because Belle was a smart cookie and always gave me good advice.
Belle looked at me and seemed to be trying to figure out a way to phrase whatever she was going to say. That was a new one for me, because Belle usually had the answer on the tip of her tongue.
"Maybe those two were meant for each other, Tyler. I mean, they both use other people with little regard for anyone's feelings other than their own. It could be that, in their own selfish way, they are as perfectly paired as you and me."
I thought about that for a minute and couldn't find much in what she said with which to disagree. I knew Feleena well enough by now to know that there wasn't much chance of her good side winning the day in the foreseeable future. Well, I could hardly call it a great loss, not with the irrepressible, irresistible Belle in my life. When I told Belle that very thing, her eyes got misty and she tried to kiss my lips off my face.
So what about Conchita you ask? Well nothing had happened on that front, because of my quixotic notion about messing with the women who worked for me. My stubbornness in the matter did not please either Belle or Conchita. I finally promised that when we went to the new club, we could include Conchita in our ever expanding family if she still wanted to, even if she didn't move with us.
Around the first of August, I started looking into the unsolved murder case of Chet Benton, the lawyer I seemed to have replaced in El Paso's history. Molly Dean set me on that path when she gave me a box of things that Chet had left in his room. She had tried to contact his family in New Orleans, but no one had answered the three letters she'd sent. Since I was a lawyer, she thought some of the stuff might be useful to me. It was, although not in the way Molly imagined, as one of the first things I found in the wooden beer crate were the notes from the last case on which he was working.
I'll bet you have already guessed his last case was representing a man, who was taking on Judge Howard and the Salt Ring, haven't you? Even more interesting, was Chet's last entry into the file. Chet wrote that his client and his client's wife had suddenly disappeared. Chet worried that they had met with foul play and had decided to speak with the sheriff about it the next day. Unfortunately, Chet himself was gunned down the same night while walking back home from the Longhorn Saloon.
I made a few notes based on Chet's file and went to visit Sheriff Faulkner myself. Faulkner had never seen Benton's files, and the investigation into Benton's death was based on his death being the end result of a robbery. Benton had died from a shotgun blast to the chest from point blank distance, his pockets had been rifled and his watch and poke were missing. Faulkner said the case was still open, but with no witnesses or suspects, it was likely to remain that way forever. When I asked for permission to pursue the matter, he told me to knock myself out.
I started my investigation by finding out all I could about Chet's missing client, Rudolpho Santiago. I found out that Santiago had owned a small rancho of two hundred acres that included a two hundred foot strip of land on the bank of the Rio Grande. Rudolpho had dug a small irrigation canal from the river almost a thousand feet into his property that he'd meticulously branched out to irrigate about thirty acres. He grew vegetables and operated a feed lot where he fattened up cattle before reselling them. The feed lot operation required plenty of saltlicks to help plump up the cows.
It was very interesting to me that the ranch was now the property of one William Braxton, also known as Riverboat Bill, and Charles Howard's asshole buddy.
I thought I was being discreet in checking up on Chet and Santiago, but somehow I must have attracted someone's attention. As a result, my visit to Shangri-La finally hit a rough spot on the night of August fifteen. Belle and I were walking home as usual that night, when I caught a movement in the mouth of an alley we were about thirty feet away from. Instinctively I pushed Belle away from me and went for my gun. Belle yelped when I shoved her and ended up sitting on her butt about five feet away from me. I yelled for her to stay down, just as a bright noisy blast issued from the mouth of the alley.
My pistol was just clearing my holster when my right arm and
shoulder exploded in pain. My pistol flew out of my suddenly numb
fingers and clattered off the wooden sidewalk and into the street.
Chapter 29