Loose Head (11 page)

It was tours like this that kept Roger Seagrave playing rugby, long after most sensible men would have hung up their boots forever. He loved the chaffing, the camaraderie, the social side of the game; but more than that, he still loved the on-field warfare. Most of all, he loved the element of skill that made the Hastewicke gentlemen so feared in old-boy rugby circles – the precise kicking game, the fluid passing, the near-telepathic backline play that testified to their more than 30 years as teammates.

As for his position on the team, well, Seagrave knew he wasn’t one of the dominant personalities – a Ian Chalmers, a John Weathersby, a Jester Atkinson, whose forceful leadership and quirky senses of humor set the tone for the rest of the lads. He was content to be a back-row boy, a good companion on tour, respected, he hoped, as much for his contributions on the field as his gentle wit off it. Oh, he knew that his meticulous, even finicky, personality raised some eyebrows; he did like things just so, and his habit of carefully folding away his clothes in the bureau, polishing his boots before each match, and dressing elegantly afterward brought him in for a measure of abuse at his teammates’ hands – for example, the time they had replaced his custom-formulated toothpaste, delicately flavoured with lemongrass and mint, with Preparation H. Still, a man on rugby tour had to be prepared to suffer the occasional indignity.

Somewhere deep inside, Roger knew he was nearing the end of his playing career, and something at the very core of his being cried out in anguish at the thought. Some day, perhaps soon, a bad fracture, a catastrophic knee injury, a severe concussion, would bring the curtain down on his rugby career. But until that day came, he was determined to play every match as if it was his last.

Seagrave was an analyst in Ian Chalmers’ old stock brokerage firm; his X-ray-like ability to see past the gloss of a company’s financial reports and accurately assess its coming performance, coupled with an ear for insider gossip, had made him a partner seven years ago.

Seagrave had been married for 31 years, to Catherine, a gentle, heavyset woman who had grown progressively stouter in the years following the birth of their now-grown daughter Elizabeth. Roger had never complained. But eighteen months ago, Catherine’s doctor, alarmed at the growing toll her obesity was taking on her circulatory system, ordered her, on pain of early death, to lose 200 pounds, and keep it off. To her surprise, and, secretly, Roger’s, she had succeeded, and now wore a size 6. But this superhuman triumph of will was not without its surprising side-effects, at least as far as their marital dynamics were concerned.

The soothing female voice of the hotel operator, crackling over the P.A. system, suddenly intruded on his reverie. ”Mr... Rhinodong. Mr... Suckah... Rhinodong. Please pick up a white paging telephone.” Then, a moment or two later: “Mr. Bollox. Mr. Harry Bollox. Please go to a white paging telephone for a message.” And finally: “Lord Ivabiggun. Lord... Ivabiggun. Please pick up a white paging telephone...” Seagrave grinned at George Waters, the Hastewicke scrum-half, who was swimming nearby. “Sounds like one of the boys is getting bored.”

Waters turned lazily onto his back, his marshmallow-white paunch floating proudly above the waves. “Bet you a tenner it’s Jester Atkinson – you know how he fancies practical jokes.”

Seagrave rose stiffly and limped to the nearby white phone, already paying the price for his heroic exertions on the rugby pitch earlier that day. “Yes, this would be Mr. Rhinodong!” he cried irritably, laying on a thick Punjabi accent. “And my Christian name is pronounced ‘Sookah!’ I tell you now that I do not find my name the slightest bit... oh, hullo, Jester, we thought it might be you. Yes, we’re down by the pool – we’ve a few bottles of the amber nectar on ice. Right, see you soon.”

Seagrave returned to his chaise lounge, lowered himself gratefully and bit back a groan of pain. “You win,” he laughed. He drained the rest of his longneck, opened another, then relaxed once more. Despite his soreness, he did feel so marvelously relaxed. Then his manhood stirred as he thought of the arrangements he had made for later this evening, and Seagrave was forced to carefully arrange his voluminous trunks to conceal his growing turgidity.

For a moment he thought of Catherine, and felt a not-insubstantial twinge of guilt. If she ever found out about what he’d planned for tonight, she would be absolutely shattered. Seagrave was not a cruel or unsympathetic man; he knew that his wife was both proud and fragile. She would be gutted, completely gutted. He understood her well enough to know that, if she ever discovered how he really felt, her emotional response would degenerate rapidly from pain to bunny-boiling rage. Only chaos would follow, and his well-ordered life would be but a memory of happiness lost. It would be a blow from which she – and their marriage – might never recover.

However, she would never know. He only hoped his planned exertions later this evening wouldn’t leave him too drained to perform in tomorrow’s final match.

III

Back in the suite he shared with Terry Ross, the Hastewicke Gentlemen fly half, Seagrave patted the last dabs of shaving cream from his face and, making a selection from the carefully-organized toiletries arrayed before him, applied a delicate spritz or two of Ralph Lauren’s “Stetson.” Then he slipped a pair of Pierre Cardin khakis over his silk Armani briefs, tucked in his flawlessly-pressed Tommy Hilfiger denim dress shirt and tugged on a well-scuffed pair of ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He glanced at his Rolex. His heart rate increased fractionally; almost time to go. He called down to the valet, to ensure that his rugby boots would be polished and returned by morning. Then he slipped out the door and down the hall to the elevator.

She is waiting, as he had asked, on the couch near the door to Suite 455. At his approach, she rises gracefully, and he sucks in his breath. She is everything he had hoped, and more. So much more.

The photos on her website fail to do her justice. She stands nearly six feet tall, her hair a silky coil of raven-black cornrow, her skin the color of strong tea with just a touch of milk. Her makeup is tasteful and immaculate; her eyes a luminous brown. Beneath her voluminous, knee-length silk dress, her flesh billows, bounces and jiggles, like the sails of a clipper ship bulging before a gale, from her enormous breasts to the plateau of her endlessly broad, shelflike buttocks. She is ...magnificent.

“Roger?” she asks with a slow, shy smile. Her voice is low and musical, an excellent thing in woman. “I’m Rosie. Whole Lotta Rosie.”

Seagrave feels himself grow weak in the knees. The truth is that, though slim himself, Roger has always found thin women unappetizingly angular. He loves Catherine, but he had liked her better as she was before she lost weight  -- soft, wobbly and lavishly proportioned. He had thought her perfect. He has always been attracted to very large women, with faces out of a Rubens canvas and bodies built for sin. There is no explaining it; God knows he has tried. Maybe it is simply their gratitude that appeals to him.

The thought of those acres of soft, undulating flesh, those fathomless, moist and mysterious crevices, in which a man might lose himself and never be found, is almost too much to bear. “Shall we go in?” he asks throatily. Rosie takes his arm, and the scent of gardenias wafts toward him. He almost moans. Instead, he produces the card-key to Suite 455 and opens the door. She is almost too vast for them to fit through the doorway together, but somehow they manage, and he is ever more aware of her mountainous femininity.

Once inside, he kisses her, unable to restrain his need any longer. If he extends his arms fully, and squeezes, he can just touch his fingertips together on the other side of her equator-like waist. The sensation of her yielding mounds of flesh against his member brings him to instant, almost painful, rigidity.

Lotta Rosie notices. With a playful grin, she reaches down and strokes him with her long nails; he almost comes then and there. “Oooh, Roger – we’re gonna be very good friends, I can tell already. You gotta be a whole lotta man to love Whole Lotta Rosie. But first –“ she leans forward to whisper in his ear “– business before pleasure. Do you have something for me?”

He has the money ready; she counts it expertly, tucks it into her handbag. “Excellent. And now, Roger.” She advances upon him like a tigress; he gives ground toward the couch. “I’m gonna show you what all those white boys with their preying mantis women have been missing.”

Rosie engulfs him with her pendulous bulk; the couch-springs scream in protest. “The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’, honey. But then –“ the slow grin is back as she hikes up her dress “– you knew that already. Or you wouldn’t never have called Rosie.”

Chapter 9

And where was I while these masterpieces of decadence were being created? One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about rugby, particularly on foreign tour, is getting to know the opposition a bit, once all the on-field action concludes. On Saturday, I encountered a few members of the Sonoma RUFC, whom we had soundly thrashed earlier that day, in the lobby of the Bellagio. One of them, a second row named Tony DeGraffenreid, turned out to be a sheriff in El Dorado County, California. We found a relatively quiet bar off the Bellagio’s cavernous, cacophonous casino, and settled in for a few pints while his mates went off to try their luck at the tables. Our discussion turned naturally to our mutual calling.

I asked him about his most interesting case. Tom narrowed his eyes in concentration, and took a drag on his Camel. “El Dorado County’s mostly pretty rural,” he said at last. “The California Gold Rush started there, and Sutter’s Mill is in my patrol area. It’s still mostly farms and forest, with a piece of greater Sacramento at the west end. Most of my calls are pretty basic – domestic disturbance, car crashes, somebody finds a pot farm tucked away in the trees. It’s a pretty interesting job, really; when your patrol area’s 100 miles square, you never really know what’s going to come your way.

“One night I get a call from this farmer – raises dairy goats and sells the milk to one of the local cheesemakers. Said he’d heard some kinda disturbance in his barn, but when he went down to check, he didn’t see anything out of whack. I checked the place out, but there was nothing to see – just a bunch of happy-looking goats and a few tire tracks in the mud outside. I give the guy my card and tell him to call me if it happens again.

“Coupla nights later, I get a call. It’s the farmer, yellin’ that it’s happened again. Only this time, he was ready. He tore out of the house with his shotgun, and fired off a round in the air. Saw some asshole down behind the barn, pulling up his pants. Then the guy jumped into a pickup and hauled ass. But this time, he left something behind – his wallet.

“So I stop by and pick it up, and the next morning, I go to see the guy – driver’s license says Mark Smith, some hippy-dippy carpenter, lives up in the hills out of Hangtown. And when I show him his wallet, he just crumbles in front of my eyes. Confesses everything, and I mean everything. About how he’d always had this thing for farm animals, since he was a little kid, and about how women had always hurt him, and how there was one pretty little blue-eyed goat he just couldn’t get out of his mind... he even shows me the feed-bag he used to keep the fuckin’ thing quiet, for Chrissake.”

A slow smile crept across Tom’s hard-planed face, in anticipation of the story’s denouement. “I let him talk, and when he finishes, I give him a real hard stare, like this – “ he demonstrated “– and I says to him, ‘Boy, I just want to know one thing. Was that goat
female
?’” Tom started to laugh, and the tears rolled down his cheeks. “And he says to me, with this horrified look on his face, ‘Course she was, Sheriff! Whaddaya think I am, some kinda
pervert
?’”

II

So there was a glimmer of a silver lining, then: thankfully none of my teammates – at least those on Weathersby’s blackmail DVDs -- had a taste for barnyard animals in tiny fishnet stockings. I couldn’t vouch for Jester Atkinson, of course, whose sexual proclivities were known to be adventurous in the extreme; for whatever reason, he had evidently satisfied them somewhere other than Suite 455.

After viewing the four blackmail disks in sequence, I felt voyeuristic, faintly nauseated, and strangely unable to look Brian in the eye, but also somewhat conflicted. I was relieved to be off the case, spared the responsibility for what now promised to be a hellishly intrusive, sensitive and difficult investigation of my closest mates. On the other hand, it was only too clear where the inquiry was leading: to a likely murder conviction for one of them, and heart-rending personal humiliation and tragedy for all, as their transgressions inevitably became known. All four were my friends, and I could think of a dozen ways I might, as a member of the investigative team, be able to spare them some small measure of discomfort. But that wouldn’t be possible now.

There was a rap on the frame of the cubicle. “Wicks wants to see you,” said Jo Singleton, the plumpish, pleasant-faced group secretary. Wondering glumly which of my faults would be under discussion this time, I braced myself, knocked and went in.

“Sit down, Reed.” He pointed to the single uncomfortable-looking chair before his desk. As before, DCI Oakhurst stood by the window, surveying me with gleeful malevolence. Wicks, on the other hand, looked angry enough to bite the nadgers off a badger. I carefully composed my face in preparation for the impending explosion.

To my surprise, it was Oakhurst who spoke first. “Good news, DI Reed! We’re putting you back on the Weathersby case!”

I stared at him blankly for a moment. “Sir? I thought my personal association with the victim and potential suspects was considered a liability.”

“We’ve re-thought that position, and now we want you to ruthlessly exploit that knowledge for our benefit. We expect you and the rest of the squad to bring this case to a swift and successful conclusion. Yes, Peter? You had something to add?”