Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Mangano is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and fashion journalist. She writes the Natalie North murder mystery book series and owns, writes, edits the global online beauty/fashion/style magazine, Nancy Marie Mangano Style. She resides in Orange County, California, and has been inducted into the City of Anaheim Business Hall of Fame as an author and fashion journalist. Author website: http://nancymangano.com Nancy Marie Mangano Style: https://nancymariemangano.com

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A PASSION FOR PASSION

By Nancy Mangano

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Nancy Mangano
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-5652-4

Chapter One

The sweat that spilled off Horace's face was enough to fill a coffee mug. The frisky gleam in his eyes highlighted his noisy clap of approval—a jackhammer eating asphalt would blast a more subdued melody. He cocked his head to the left as his floppy cheek sagged near his shoulder. His baritone, rowdy wolf whistles kept beat to the piped-in music blaring through the club's murky air.

The buxom brunette, dressed in only a leopard print thong and platform stilettos, and who seconds ago had teased the entire audience, now gyrated her fleshy hips for Horace's solo pleasure. She shimmied to the end of the stage, inches from the honorable judge's lustful gaze, rotated her pelvis in seductive circular motions, and surprised him with a blunt forward thrust. His hungry, beady eyes ballooned to the size of quarters.

Natalie grasped her opportunity and pressed four consecutive times on the shutter button of her compact camera. She reveled in her accomplishment as she captured the lewd, gleeful expressions plastered across Horace's pudgy face. She then focused the camera on the obscene tart now draped around the stripper pole, tossing a flirtatious wink at Horace. She was the same female caught on a previous roll of film in a strong lip lock with Horace Grewall.

When Natalie snapped her final picture, the longneck beer bottle clock said 2:15 pm. She empathized with the heartbreak Zola Grewall would undoubtedly endure because of her husband's playboy shenanigans. Natalie's thoughts were broken by a liquored-up wino seated on a nearby barstool.

"If you aren't the classiest little tramp I've ever seen in this dive," the drunk man slurred. He tried to stand, swooned in wonderment at her, his eyes bloodshot as his stare settled on her perky bosom.

Natalie responded with a killer look.

"Today's my birthday," he belched. "Give Papa a present. C'mon—gimme a shot of whatcha' got under there."

I'll shoot you all right.

Natalie tucked her camera into her carrying bag and slipped her elegant fingers around her .38-caliber revolver. Nervous tingles sped up and down her spine. She hoped never to utilize her deadly protective partner, but when conducting fieldwork, her daddy insisted she keep the lethal gun close.

"Takes the place of me," her daddy would profess, "since I can't always be there to protect my itty-bitty baby girl. It's a peril of the business is all."

Natalie analyzed the situation, sensed it was under control, and calmed down some. There was no need for her fatal guardian angel to rear its devilish head. Not this time.

The inebriated fool inched his acne-pitted face close to Natalie's smooth skin, puckered his hopeful lips, and lost his balance. The floor shook as it was pummeled with 285 pounds of perverted dead weight. Natalie smirked, the intoxicated fool the object of her glee, and attempted to step over the heap of booze-perfumed flesh.

"Happy birthday," she said as her spiked heel pierced into his flaccid family jewels.

His yelp was of an unmistakable origin.

Anxious for fresh air and a clear head, she exited the disreputable club and sprinted through the parking lot; the shelter of her luxury car was her destination. She ran the sleaze-infested obstacle course with extreme precision, stepping over numerous cigarette butts, a hypodermic syringe, and two used condoms. She leaped over a scurrying cockroach, but instead felt a squish as the bottom of her shoe smashed the crawly critter to smithereens.

As she stepped into her black BMW 325i, she made a mental note to ask her daddy for hazard pay and to wash the soles of her shoes with chlorine.

"It's my life ..."

Natalie North sang along with the lyrics filtering from her radio as she inched through the endless Los Angeles traffic; grills and bumpers her main scenery.

Yeah, it is my life. How did I ever end up twenty-nine years old, still single, no one to call me Mommy and trailing rotten, cheating, no-good partners to make some fast cash?

Her open window invited in a whoosh of LA smog and a thick, odorous swarm of exhaust. She inhaled with a mighty fervor. It was like breathing in the unsullied air of the Alps compared to the stink she had been surrounded by minutes earlier, with what was to Natalie just another day on the job.

* * *

Relieved to be wrapped in the secure atmosphere of her Santa Monica office, Natalie removed the film she was certain would end Horace and Zola's fifteen-year marriage and packed it away, to be processed. A constant menu of sniffing out deceitful partners and breaking blameless hearts was losing its immoral flavor.

"Any luck finding the Honorable Judge Horace Grewall?" Amy asked.

"If you call following him to some seedy strip club lucky."

"That pathetic hound! So you caught him barking at all those big breasts?" Amy snickered. "What club?"

"It's called The Yearning Den. Nothing but a bunch of drunk lowlifes."

"That strip joint in South Central?"

"You know that loser lounge?" Natalie asked with amazement.

"Don't ask!"

Amy Cobb's plump fingers puffed her bouffant hairdo to perfection.

"I don't know why I'm shocked, but I thought I had seen it all. Then Horace spends his afternoons at the nude bar instead of at the Los Angeles Superior Court House," Natalie said. "On work hours even!"

"Sweet deliverance, on taxpayer dollars? Men! That Horace sounds like a damn dumb one!"

"Yes, he does! That simpleton is taking a big chance. Someone could recognize him from his position on the bench."

"Now someone's going to identify him from his position on the floozy." Amy reached into the open bag of corn chips perched on her desktop and plopped three into her mouth. "What in the Good Lord's name happened to that man's brain?"

"It obviously went berserk," Natalie said. "I sure hope his rendezvous with Strippy Poo is worth it when Mrs. Grewall views the evidence."

Three years as a private investigator, swallowing a continual dosage of adulterous monkey business, had taught Natalie that lust and passion adhere to their own decadent policies.

"Have you scheduled Zola Grewall's next appointment?" Natalie asked.

"All taken care of. It's one week from today. I've ordered the extra tissue, like you asked me to."

"Glad to hear it! We're going to need it with our little Zola."

"You think she'll gush the tears of a toddler's temper tantrum?"

"Worse! Her eyes will spill so much liquid we'll be bobbing for our lives, and that's with life jackets!"

"That bad, huh?"

Amy plopped a corn chip into her mouth up and over, as if tossing a basketball into a hoop.

"That well-respected, prominent official of a husband of hers used his smutty hands to fondle every inch of that stripper's va-va-va-voom bust," Natalie said.

Amy's eyes remained glued to Natalie's fingers as they ricocheted through the lobby, demonstrating Horace's touchy-feely hand motions. Natalie stayed authentic to Horace's actions and plastered the judge's filthy facial gestures across her own appealing face. Amy's noticeable features were bathed in disgust.

"I sure hope His Honor is willing to pay a hefty price for his flagrant dishonor, because I have a suspicious hunch that the next thing to go bust will be his marriage," Amy said.

The two women broke into boisterous laughter.

...