Death on a Ping Pong Table (An Erotic Murder Mystery)

By Habu

A Knife, a Hanky, a Book, and a Dead Body. A great hot and erotic murder mystery.
The unusual thing about Hilton Head homicide detective Quinn Fawker isn’t just that he is promiscuous and gets away with it but also that he is actively bisexual and not only gets away with it, but has the looks and equipment to get away with it frequently and with many partners. When he is called to the Sea Pines compound of South Carolina U.S. Senator Bradford Braxton to investigate the finding of a body draped over the senator’s ping pong table, he gets dropped into a cast of characters also accustomed to getting away with sexual shenanigans. One or more of the powerful people found at the senator’s beachfront house that night is also trying to get away with murder. And it quickly becomes apart that a cover-up of the actual events is already well under way and that the death on the ping pong table is perhaps not the first death involved in the case.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BarbarianSpy
• Release date: Sep 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781925190106

Habu

Habu is one of the pen names of a former supersonic spy jet pilot, intelligence agent, male model, movie actor, and diplomat. A wild youth in South East Asia was spent enjoying whatever sexual opportunities came his way, and much of his gay male writing is about recalling incidents from those days and inventing ones he'd perhaps have liked to experience. He now leads a very quiet and ordinary life. Check out our blog and get free stories. Feedback and reviews are always appreciated.

Book preview

Chapter One: Death in the Lanai

The three items on the ping pong table—a handkerchief, a book, and a knife—caught my immediate attention, because they were positioned so oddly, and I found myself being a little embarrassed. What I obviously should have noticed first was the body of the young woman stretched out on the ping pong table, on her belly. I marked it as occupational jadedness, having seen so many bodies as a homicide detective in the Hilton Head, South Carolina, police force, that the body itself didn’t fill my first thoughts. But I hadn’t said anything out loud, so no foul.

The young woman was a blonde, but not a natural one. I could see some dark strands peeking out from under the pile of hair that radiated out from her head and covered much of the center of the ping pong table. The cause of death seemed obvious to me, given the bloody slits in her back. The three stab wounds were about where the hook of her bra would have been if the bra hadn’t been unhooked, the wings of each side of the back strap flaring out from her body, and the diaphanous blouse had been pulled off her back but was still hanging on one of her raised arms. Both arms were raised over her head, as if she had been reaching for the far edge of the ping pong table when she’d been stabbed.

One thing was immediately clear—she probably hadn’t run here from anywhere. I couldn’t fathom how she’d even been able to walk on those impossibly high stiletto heels. The feet were big, so the shoes stood out. They were red, with straps encircling her legs a couple of times above her ankles. There was a smear of blood, a matching red, under the body as if she had pulled herself up the table in her death throes.

The knife hadn’t been left in any of the wounds. That’s why it had caught my attention. A big Bowie hunting knife lay at the side of the body, the blade still slick with the blood. We’d check, of course, but I was sure the handle had been wiped clean of prints. I doubted there was anyone who had missed the need for that if they had ever watched a crime show on TV.

She couldn’t have been dead for very long. Blood only glistens like that for so long. The shimmering effect was enhanced, though, by the light in the overhead ceiling fan being deflected rhythmically by the slow wonk, wonk of the blades.

The handkerchief and the book had also been odd, which is why my attention had gone to them. The handkerchief was navy-blue and in a rough cotton that didn’t go with what the victim had been wearing—or, rather, had barely been wearing. The obviously coordinated color scheme of her attire had been pinks and a rose color. The blouse was some sort of almost transparent white rayon. Rose-shaped flowers were painted on it in pinks and reds that probably were designed to cover the strategic areas blouses are supposed to cover because the base material certainly wouldn’t. But then maybe the whole idea was to let the lacy bra show through.

The skirt, an almost fluorescent rose, was probably a tight miniskirt of a silky texture. I say probably because it was bunched up around her waist. In contrast, the pink panties had been pulled down in back below the orbs of her buttocks.

I suppose if I hadn’t been distracted by the handkerchief, book, and knife, my first attention would have gone to her butt cheeks, which were nicely rounded and were fully, obscenely exposed. I can respond to a nicely mounded ass of any persuasion. The orbs were unusually firm for a woman, as were the muscles of the thigh. A dancer perhaps, I speculated.

Certainly one of the first-responding policemen—Chad, I think his name was—couldn’t keep his eyes off the butt cheeks. The better-looking, better-toned young policeman who I knew as Ted, though, was looking at the same thing I was. The rough cotton, navy-blue handkerchief. That had a meaning in my world. It was incongruous to see it in this venue. I instinctively felt for my back left pocket and was reassured that my own navy-blue handkerchief was still buried there.

It was interesting that Ted seemed absorbed in the handkerchief too. I took a second, appreciative look at the young officer. Quite well turned out he was.

More incongruous, though, probably, was the book. It was a hardback, open at something close to the middle. What was odd about that, though, was that the victim’s face was laying on it. Her nose must have been buried in the gutter of the open book. A trickle of blood oozed across the open page. The knifing obviously had caused internal bleeding.

The medical examiner, hatchet-faced Cheryl, the black dyke—not that any of us called her that to her face—had arrived shortly before Karen and I had. She had just started to poke around the body. I knew better than to ask her any questions at this point. She was a crackerjack at what she did, but she could bite your head off if you interrupted her initial examination—and if you were male. When it looked like she was ready to pontificate, I’d send Karen into the scrum. Cheryl had a thing for Karen that my partner and I exploited shamelessly.

I had been called from my favorite bar, Jimmy’s, near the other side of the tracks area of Spanish Wells, on the side of the island away from the ocean, so I was comfortably dressed in a polo shirt and khakis. And since there were more homicides on the resort island of Hilton Head than anyone wanted to talk about, I wasn’t too disgruntled to be called from cruising there to go across the island to the Sea Pines area and to the line of millionaires’ oceanfront mansions on commodious lots kissed by extensive waterfront. It was just part of the territory for me to hang loose for the next time some trophy wife went after her straying husband with a butcher knife—or vice versa.

My young sidekick, Karen Clark, though, seemed to have been called from a more important activity. She was dressed in a sexy cocktail dress. The material was shiny black to match the boyish, yet still very feminine, cut of hair the svelte beauty favored. The overall effect was one of a sexy wood nymph, which was the opposite of what anyone would expect of a police detective. This too