(1969) The Seven Minutes (40 page)

about Jadway and the mystery of Jadway, I remembered those letters. Then I remembered something else - some autograph dealer in New York who was always advertising in The New York Times saying if anyone had authentic letters by historical figures or celebrities to sell, that he was in the market to buy them at good prices. So I thought of that, and thought, By Christ, this Jadway must be a celebrity, so why not see if the letters are worth anything ? I mean, I’m not a rich man. I can always use an extra buck. So I went hunting for the letters, had a helluva job finding them, but I did. Then I wrote this autograph dealer what I had, and back comes a telegram saying he’ll buy the lot and saying what they’re worth. They weren’t worth much, but it was a few bucks, so I shipped them on and back came his check.’

Barrett’s face fell. ‘You haven’t got them? Not even photocopies?’

‘Naw, what would I do with copies ? I just sent them off, took the dough and ran.’

‘When was that?’

‘Maybe a week - no,- closer to ten days ago. Yeah.’

‘What was in those letters?’ Barrett asked anxiously. ‘Can you recall anything of what was in them?’

‘Mister, I’m ashamed to say I never even bothered to read them, except to make sure they were signed “Sincerely yours, J J Jadway,” which they were. You see, when I got them from Leroux I was already starting to get in trouble with the law. So I never put Jad-way’s book out. I was in enough hot water as is. All my mind was on my own trial before the federal judicial officer and later the Supreme Court appeal and after that trying to make a living some new way. So when I got the letters, they didn’t interest me and 1 just put them away. When 1 dug them out a few weeks ago, before writing that autograph dealer, I was busy as hell, so I just checked to see if Jadway’s name was on them and how many pages and that was enough to write the dealer. So I don’t know nothing. Why you looking like the whole world died ? Those letters important to you ?’

‘Mr Quandt, I can’t tell you how important. Leroux is here to appear in the witness stand and tell the court that The Seven Minutes is hard-core pornography written by a deliberate pornographer. In other words, dirt for dirt’s sake. Those letters could contradict his evidence. I’m positive they would. They could spearhead out defense against the State’s case, Mr Quandt.’

‘You mean, against that bastard Elmo Duncan?’

‘That’s right.’

Quandt made a fist. ‘Dammit. Why did I give them up? I probably could’ve got twice as much for them from you.’

‘You certainly could have,’ said Barrett. ‘But now -‘ He halted. ‘Sa-ay, you said you sold those letters to a well-known autograph dealer in New York City, didn’t you? Well, what does that dealer want with those letters, except to put them on the market, resell

them at a profit ? Of course. If he hasn’t sold them to some customer by now - and he’d only had them ten days, you said - then I can still lay my hands on them. What’s his name?’

‘The autograph dealer?’

‘Right.’

Quandt rapped his knuckles against his brow. ‘His name, his name? Christ, I’ll be damned if I can remember… . One sec. There’s got to be something upstairs. Either the advertisement I clipped or the carbon of my letter when I wrote him offering the Jadway letters. I got my correspondence file cabinet upstairs in the mail-order room. You come on up with me and let’s see if I can find it.’

They left the back yard, and Barrett followed Quandt through the back door of the apartment building and down the hall to the front staircase, which they ascended to the second floor.

Slowing before a door at the rear, Quandt said over his shoulder, The mail room’s in here.’

He opened the door and stepped inside, with Barrett right behind him. The first sight that met Barrett’s eyes stopped him dead in his tracks. His eyes widened. He was incredulous.

Lying supine on a beige daybed against the opposite wall of the office was a stark-naked nymph, no more than twenty years old, titian-haired, large breasts with protruding crimson nipples, long sinuous body and legs, and she was writhing in ecstasy. One hand was moving between her legs, obviously stimulating her clitoris, and her eyes were closed and her face contorted in self-induced passion.

At once another girl, this one fully clothed in a crisp white blouse and short pleated skirt, appeared in view and walked between Barrett and the writhing naked one masturbating on the daybed. The second girl had straight bangs, severely bunned hair, and hornrimmed spectacles, and she was carrying a pencil and shorthand pad. As she passed, she suddenly became aware of the activity on the daybed. She halted, and so astounded was she that she dropped her pad and pencil. She knelt to retrieve them, her eyes holding with fascination on the girl beside her. Ignoring her pad and pencil on the floor, she slowly removed her spectacles, crawled closer to the daybed, and bent, placing her open lips on one of the titian-haired beauty’s crimson nipples. The supine one opened her eyes, ceased her activity, and fervently embraced the full clothed secretary.

‘Dammit,’ Quandt muttered, ‘I forgot we’re using the office for a set today.’

For the first time Barrett pulled his eyes from the scene before him, and for the first time, to the right, he saw the motion-picture camera on a tripod with a paunchy middle-aged man behind it, one eye glued to the viewer as he concentrated on the shot. Next to him, a single powerful klieg light joined the overhead light bulbs in the office to brighten the scene.

Quandt cast Barrett a sidelong glance. *You guessed it,’ he rasped defensively. ‘It’s a stag film, a subsidiary part of my operation I don’t advertise.’

Barrett nodded dumbly.

‘We shoot these four-hundred-foot reelers silent and we can do one in a day and they’re damn good,’ he said, still defensive. ‘We got the classiest clientele - patriotic organizations, veterans’ groups, even universities, you name it - and they want the stuff in good taste, and we supply it.’ He scowled at Barrett, ready to read any signs of disapproval, but Barrett knew that an impassive expression had remained frozen on his face. ‘They’re using my office for this one, and that’s my file cabinet back there behind the secretary’s desk, but I better not try to get to it until the scene’s finished.’ He edged forward. ‘Let me see how long it’s got to go.’

Barrett’s attention had gone back to the scene in the making.

The naked girl on the daybed had already unbuttoned the secretary’s crisp blouse, and now the kneeling secretary wriggled out of her blouse, cast it aside, stood up, unbuttoned and unzipped her skirt, and stepped out of it. Swiftly she unhooked her brassiere, kicked off her high-heeled pumps, divested herself of garter belt and stockings and flimsy underpants. Now she pirouetted seductively for the girl on the sofa and for the camera, and, doing so, she undid her bunned hair and let it fall to her shoulders in a gesture of liberation and abandonment. Her pear-shaped breasts heaved, her broad buttock with its strawberry mark trembled, and as she came around once more her hand slipped down below the appendix scar to circle her darkly matted vaginal mound teasingly.

Completing her second circle, she looked off at the cameraman, and his hand lifted, directing her to the sofa. Imperceptibly she nodded. In a second she was in the titian-haired girl’s arms, and then free of the other’s embrace, and then kissing the other’s heaving breasts and squirming belly and continuing the amorous foreplay at great length.

The recipient of this lovemaking was now using her hands to direct her partner’s head, and as she did this her eyes were shut tightly and she was gasping. Barrett wondered if she was acting or actually becoming sexually aroused. He decided that girls like this couldn’t act at all, and that this was for real. And what kind of girls were these, anyway?

He looked at Quandt, and the pornographer’s broad forehead glistened, and his close-set eyes shone, and he chewed steadily on the cold cigar as he dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His concentration was intense and total. By God, Barrett thought, he enjoys it. He’s in it for love and money, the professional Peeping Tom, the true scopophiliac who derives pleasure from watching the sex organs and acts of others. What a field day the American Psychiatric Association might have with a subject like Quandt. According to some psychoanalysts, men’s chosen careers were

guided by dark and hidden desires. The publicly healing surgeon was subconsciously the sadist finding an outlet in the carving scalpel. The devoted social worker and the charitable clubwoman and the church saint were subconsciously shoring up their neurotic feelings of inferiority by earning the dependence of others, thus providing themselves with feelings of superiority. The analyst himself, sagely listening beside the mentally ill patient on the couch, was in some deep recess of his own ego a voyeur and nothing more. So what were the unknown drives that had brought Quandt to this sick and strange clandestine business of providing sexual excitation by means of a strip of celluloid? And, indeed, thought Barrett, why in the devil had he himself stayed in this room to continue observing what should be a private act being staged under the glare of klieg lights for commercial reasons?

He could not help but see, once more, what was taking place on the daybed. The titian-haired girl on her back, fingers clutching her breasts, torso tautly arched high, was waiting hungrily for fulfillment as the other nude female, between her legs and above her, was fondling a ten-inch hard rubber dildo, the manufactured version of the fantasy penis in millions of minds. As the girl on her knees was about to tie on the dildo, Barrett became aware of a third actor in the room. A sinewy, strapping man in his thirties, who appeared uncomfortable in his conservative business suit, was removing his bowler hat as he viewed the scene with visible annoyance. The girls had seen him now and had ceased their performance, and they cowered before his outrage. He was pointing to the time clock.

Barrett heard Quandt chuckle beside him. Quandt leaned over, grinning, and whispered, ‘A little touch I put in. The boss arrives at work, finds his two secretaries bare-assed and doing their shtick on his sofa, and all he objects to is that they’re wasting office time and not working. Not bad, eh? Watch this.’

Barrett watched. Angrily the boss had thrown his hat on a chair, advanced upon his recoiling girls, and snatched the dildo away. He gestured at it with contempt and then held it against his trousers, indicating that it was nothing compared to the real thing, and suddenly he was inviting his girls to make their choice. The histrionic fright of both girls turned to joy and as the boss dropped the dildo and then his suit coat to the floor, the kneeling girl reached out to help him off with his trousers.

Quandt burst into open laughter and then tried to stifle it, and at once the entire scene came to a standstill. The male actor, stripped down to his shorts, had whirled around at the laughter, and now he eyed Quandt with exasperation.

‘Je-sus, Norman, how do you expect me - ?’ the actor began to complain.

‘Sorry, Gil, sorry, I only meant it for a compliment. You go right on. We’ll be outside. Go on, go on, don’t break the scene, we can’t waste time.’

Quandt had Barrett by the arm and hustled him out of the office and into the corridor, closing the door softly behind him, shaking his head. ‘Gil’s one of those guys who can’t make it if he’s reminded that he’s being watched. Very temperamental. He’s used to the cameraman by now, and that doesn’t bother him. But if there’s anyone besides the cast in the room, he droops. But I like to use him. I’ve used him in ten pictures already. If talent could be measured by displacement, Gil would be an Academy Award winner ten times ovei. When those chippies get through going over him, well, his acting apparatus will make that dildo look like a midget standin. What a wang - makes ours look like warts.’ He eyed Barrett. ‘First time you’ve ever seen anything like this?’

‘Well, the first time I’ve ever seen one being made. When I was younger, in college, I saw a few stag films in the frat houses, but that’s about it,’ said Barrett.

‘But you never saw one made? Well, what do you think?’

‘Every man to his own,’ said Barrett. ‘It’s just not my type of thing.’

‘You mean you think it’s abnormal,’ said Quandt with a hint of nastiness in his tone.

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Barrett quickly.

‘Let me tell you something, maybe teach you a few facts of life from my experience in this business. And from my reading, too, I read plenty. I’ve even read those Kinsey books. Maybe you didn’t, but I did. You know what ? In those interviews it was proved that seventy-seven per cent of the males they tested got aroused, got sexy, when they watched portrayals of sexual activity. And as for females, there were even thirty-three per cent of them that admitted that stag films and still photographs gave them the hots. What I’m saying is there’s a healthy need for this kind of stimulant, see. Did you ever look at pictures of those sculptured carvings on those holy temples in India made nine centuries ago ? Those were stag sculptures, and they were there because there was a need for them. That movie I’m making inside my mail-order room, The Perfect Secretary, who do you think it’s for? For me, to get kicks? Naw. It’s for parties in the best college fraternities, and American Legion smokers, and Rotary and Kiwanis meetings where respectable businessmen get together for an evening of relaxation. It’s better they get their charges second hand instead of going out and picking up some gash on the street and getting the clap. But that’s not all. I’m not just making these pictures to entertain. I’m making them also for scientific reasons, for big universities that keep collections of erotica in order to show all sides of life in our time. You heard that the Kinsey Sex Research Institute at the University of Indiana has a collection of stag reels going back over a half century? Well, you ought to see the list of universities I sell my product to. Our biggest customer is a professor at Reardon College in Wisconsin, Dr Rolf Lagergren, the sex-survey man -‘

‘Yes,’ Barrett interrupted. ‘I’ve talked to him on the phone. He’s coming here to be one of our witnesses.’