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lithe bronzed houseboy Armando was unable to polish it at all, try as he might, and even though Dorcas had sternly ordered him to polish to an impossible shine all ninety-seven doorknobs in her vast estate (an almost exact replica of Mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle, oddly and inappropriately situated in a second-ring suburb of Omaha just across a busy truck route from an Applebees and a Rapid Oil Change), so Dorcas decided to punish him for his unforgivable failure by requiring him to serve high tea to her bridge club while dressed only in a glimmering chain mail loincloth, patent-leather platform shoes and nipple rings (with bells); and when the three blue-haired bridge club ladies arrived, Armando obediently ushered them into the drawing room (they could not help noticing his rippling buttocks as they followed behind him) and served them Formosa Oolong tea, Hostess Cupcakes and tiny cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, along with four lines of coke precisely arranged on an antique Minoan mirror and small servings of absinthe in lovely translucent Spode demitasse cups; but a few minutes later, when Dorcas, clad fetchingly in a sari and beaded mukluks, slithered into the room and sat down at the card table with her friends, Armando, having at last made up his mind that he would suffer no further indignities at the hands of his employer (notwithstanding her encyclopedic knowledge of some fascinating little-known Tantric techniques that she regularly practiced on him -- he knew he would miss that part), swiftly and mercilessly bludgeoned Dorcas and her guests with a marble bust of Erasmus until they lay on the parquet in a featureless quivering heap of sanguinous meat; and then, delighting in the results of his long-anticipated murder spree, he wrapped himself in Dorcas' favorite mohair afghan, cued up her old reel-to-reel tape recorder, brought her platinum kazoo to his lips and cheerfully recorded a tinny Ravel's 'Bolero.'
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