Free The Coal Black Asphalt Tomb: A Berger and Mitry Mystery (Berger and Mitry Mysteries) by David Handler Page A

me to spend the whole weekend with him on board the Monster . It was all so magical that I floated home on a cloud. Packed my things in the morning and hurried on down to the yacht club. He had told me he wanted to cast off by nine. When I got there he—he had another girl on board. She was as shocked to see me as I was to see her. Lance was shocked, too. Or he pretended to be. Said he was sorry if I’d gotten the wrong impression but that he’d just been kidding around last night. Believe me, he wasn’t kidding around when he coaxed me out of my panties. I—I’d never been so humiliated in my life. Went slinking home and cried for two straight days.”
    Bitsy looked at her in horror. “Helen, I can’t believe he did that to you.”
    “I never got over it,” Helen confessed. “I should have, but I couldn’t. The next time a young man took an interest in me I was immediately on the defensive. I didn’t want to get hurt that way again. It became a—a pattern with me after that when it came to young men. Which isn’t to say there were very many. And it wasn’t long before they stopped showing any interest in me at all.” She swallowed, her eyes glistening behind her wire-framed glasses. “After that I took to watching him in morbid fascination when he showed up at the club dances. There was nothing subtle about Lance. He was relentless. And so persuasive. That man could talk proper married ladies into slipping out to the parking lot for a quickie between dinner and dessert. And their husbands never suspected a thing.”
    “He had his way with more than a few married women,” Sheila confirmed. “But his favorite prey was the girlfriends of his friends.”
    “Not to mention his own brother’s,” Helen added, nodding.
    “Wait, wait. Are you saying he had an affair with Delia?”
    Helen arched an eyebrow at Mitch. “If you can call a few quickies in the backseat of his Mustang an affair. Delia was mad for Lance.”
    “Delia was mad for a lot of the boys,” Sheila pointed out. “She was a giggly little pushover in those days, especially if she had a couple of drinks in her. Easy Deezy, they used to call her. She must have had sex with half of the eligible young men in Dorset before she settled on dull-as-dishwater Bob.”
    Mitch drank his high-octane tea, trying to picture a hefty dowager such as Delia Paffin having furtive parking-lot sex with her future husband’s big brother. He couldn’t. Maybe because this was the real world, Dorset style. And the real world, he was discovering, was a whole lot sleazier and crazier than anything that Hollywood could dream up. “Did Bob know about Delia and Lance?”
    “I’d be willing to bet you that same shiny quarter the thought never so much as crossed Bob’s mind,” Sheila answered. “Unlike his pal Chase.”
    Mitch peered at her. “So our first selectwoman’s mother had a fling with Lance, too?”
    “That’s not all she had,” Helen said.
    Bitsy let out a gasp. “So it’s true ? I’ve never known whether to believe that story about Beryl or not.”
    “Wait, what story?” Mitch wanted to know.
    “Lance got Beryl pregnant a year before she married Chase,” Sheila informed him. “Mind you, Beryl was a much, much steeper hill for Lance to climb. Mount Kilimanjaro compared to Delia. Beryl was a poised, elegant young lady. Well bred, well mannered and the prettiest girl in Dorset.”
    “All of us envied her,” Helen said. “Resented her, too. She was so perfect.”
    Sheila nodded. “A man like Lance Paffin couldn’t resist her. And she couldn’t resist him, apparently. Because it sure wasn’t Chase who knocked her up when she was a senior at Wellesley.”
    “How do you know that?” Mitch asked.
    “If it had been Chase’s baby they’d have moved up their wedding date,” the old schoolteacher explained. “But they didn’t. Instead, Beryl went to Barbados for spring break.”
    “None of that crowd went to Barbados,” Helen informed