69 Barrow Street Read Online Free Page B

size by the time she was fourteen. She was never physically awkward the way so many adolescent girls are. She grew from a pretty child to a beautiful woman with no unpleasant period of transition.
    And since she was eleven she would spend time before the mirror, looking at her reflection and admiring it. She would cup her breasts and squeeze them gently, telling herself that they were beautiful. She would strike poses before the mirror and study the effect at great length.
    Both her early development and her strong basic sex drives had a good deal to do with the course of her life. Stella’s father had been a doctor in Bay Shore and he had made a good deal of money. Her mother, who was a few years older than her husband, died of throat cancer while Stella was still in grade school. Her parents had been very close to one another and the shock ruined her father. He tended to blame himself for it. Since he was a doctor himself, he argued that he should have made certain his wife had periodic physical examinations which might have caught the disease in time, before it was too late.
    And so he began to drink. His practice went quietly to hell and he spent all his time by himself in the room where he and Stella’s mother had lived, drinking bonded bourbon from an Old Fashioned glass and talking softly to himself. Stella was on her own by the time she was twelve—not on her own like a slum child, for she had plenty of money and a good home. On her own in that there was no one to take care of her, no one to talk to her, no one to love her.
    And she needed love, needed it desperately. She sought love wherever it was available, but the empty, vacant atmosphere that was her home turned love to sex and emotion to passion. Love fell by the wayside; Stella never did find out what it really meant.
    But she slept with a lot of people.
    She approached sex the way that she approached life in general—bluntly, directly, and solely in her own self-interest. She took whatever she wanted and she wanted nearly everything.
    Her father died shortly after she entered high school. Both high school and the three years she spent in college were a chore for her. She already knew precisely how she wanted to spend the rest of her life, and she didn’t need a college diploma in order to carry through with her plans.
    The income from her father’s estate came to a little over twelve thousand dollars a year. While this didn’t make her really wealthy, it meant that she could lead a life of complete and total leisure, never working and never doing anything other than what she wanted to do. And this was fine with Stella James.
    She moved to the Village, the one place where she was sure she could live as she pleased with no outside interference. She took lovers when she wanted them. That was her life and she enjoyed it.
    Sometimes—but not very often—a vague feeling would pass through her mind that she was missing something, that her life was a waste and that the world she lived in was an empty one. The thought was essentially disturbing, and she fought that thought as she fought anything which threatened to disturb the relative security of her existence.
    She found a new person to make love to or a new way to make love.
    The thought was passing through her mind then as she looked at her body in the mirror. She remembered the previous night and something about it bothered her. It seemed as though every sexual encounter of late was getting just so much more depraved and twisted. Ordinarily this didn’t bother her; she looked upon perversion and depravity as the natural outgrowth of sex.
    But something seemed wrong. She had to do something to make herself feel better.
    She knew what to do.
    Humming softly to herself she went to the bedroom and dressed quickly. Then she returned to the living room and picked up the receiver of the phone. She made herself comfortable on the couch and dialed a number.
    After several rings a man’s voice said: