Speaking of Lust - the novella (4 page)

“
If I don’t get to fuck her,” he said, “I’ll fucking die.”

She was sitting alone, with an empty seat next to her, and he was on the point of going over and taking the empty seat and hitting on her, when her companion turned up---her husband, although we didn’t find that out until later. He was a tall man with a mustache and a sport jacket that looked like it was made from a horse blanket, and he was carrying a tray with a couple of hot dogs and a couple of beers. He sat down next to the redhead, and before he sat down he looked over in our general direction.

“
He looks wrong,” I said, meaning he looked like a lawbreaker. Hard to say what makes a guy look right or wrong, but a cop gets so he knows. Unconsciously he’s adding up a whole batch of signs and mannerisms, and he knows.

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He damn well ought to look wrong,” Mike Walbeck said. “That’s Harv Jellin. He’s got a sheet, he’s done state time. Now how in the hell does a skell like Harv Jellin get a broad like that?”

I shrugged and turned my attention back to the game, but Walbeck was lost for the evening, his attention taken up entirely by the redhead and the man beside her. “You know what I wonder?” he said. “I wonder just what Harv Jellin was doing two weeks ago Saturday.”

“
Two weeks ago---“

“
Two weeks ago Saturday,” he said, “which was the night a couple of mopes knocked off the Cutler warehouse. All of a sudden I like Harv for that one. I like him a whole lot.”

God knows we didn’t have anything like a lead in the warehouse robbery, and there was plenty of pressure to solve it, because the perps had left a body behind---the night watchman, dead from a single blow to the head. Within a few days we’d made an arrest, picking up a three-time loser named O’Regan.

“
We know you were just along to keep Harv Jellin company,” Walbeck told him. “He’s the one who set up the job and he’s definitely the one hit the watchman over the head. You’d never do a thing like that, would you? Hit an old guy over the head, crack his skull like an eggshell.”

“
I wasn’t even there,” O’Regan said.

“
We got you dead to rights,” Walbeck said, “and the only question is what kind of time you do. You roll over on your pal Jellin and you get the minimum. You hold out and you’re in the joint the rest of your life.”

“
I hardly know Jellin,” the mope said.

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Then you don’t owe him a thing, do you? And he’s your Get Out Of Jail Free card, so you better remember how well you know him.”

“
It’s coming back to me,” O’Regan said.

Between O’Regan’s testimony and some artfully manufactured and planted evidence, Harvey Jellin didn’t stand a chance. His lawyer convinced him to plead to robbery and manslaughter, arguing that otherwise a murder conviction was a foregone conclusion.

When you enter a guilty plea, you have to stand up in court and say what happened. I was there, and you could see how it infuriated Jellin to have to perjure himself in order to dodge a life sentence. “I only hit him once,” he said of the dead watchman, “and I never meant to hurt him.”

He got ten-to-twenty. The watchman’s daughter told a reporter that was far too lenient, but it didn’t seem all that lenient to me, given that the sonofabitch hadn’t done anything.

Not that I wasted tears on him. Jellin had done plenty of other things we hadn’t been able to hang on him, and it was common knowledge that he’d killed a man in a bar fight, and probably one or two others as well. He went off to serve his time, and Walbeck got busy putting the moves on Joanie.

The wives of convicted felons are easy game, same as recent widows. They’re made to order for cops, and Walbeck wasn’t the first police officer to move in on a woman after sending her husband to the joint. He might have had a harder time if the redhead had known he’d framed Jellin, but she didn’t have a clue. Jellin had protested all along that he was being framed, or at least until he’d taken the plea, but criminals say that all the time, in and out of prison.

It took Walbeck a while, but he got her. And then he was stuck, because he couldn’t get enough of her.

“
She’s in my blood,” he said. “The woman’s a fucking virus.”

I’d never seen him like this before. It stopped him from chasing tail, because Joanie Jellin got all his attention. He didn’t turn down what came along---I don’t think he was capable of turning anything down in that department---but he quit seeking it out. And he spent every spare moment he could with the redhead.

The prison that housed her husband has an enlightened administration, and prisoners with good conduct privileges were able to receive monthly conjugal visits. The prisoner and his spouse would repair to a small house trailer, known inevitably as the Fuck Truck, where they could enjoy a romantic interlude of no more than an hour.

At first Walbeck didn’t want her to go, but he had to agree that her absence would make Jellin suspicious. So he took to going with her, and he would make an expedition out of it, inventing some pretext to explain his overnight absence to his wife, and switching shifts with other cops or, more often, getting me to sign him in and out.

The evening before a conjugal visit, Walbeck and Joanie Jellin would drive to the town where the prison was situated and check in at a motel with waterbeds and porn videos. (“This is where they ought to have the goddam visits,” Joanie told him. “This beats the hell out of the fuck truck.”) With a fifth of vodka and one or another illegal substance to keep the party lively, the two would screw themselves silly all night long.

Then, in the morning, Joanie would drive to the prison to meet her husband.

Walbeck tried to get her to skip her morning shower. “You gotta be crazy,” she told him. “You want to get me killed? He smells you on me, he breaks my neck right there in the fuck truck. What’s he care, they tack a few more years on his sentence?”

She won that argument. But she didn’t argue when he wanted to take her straight to bed the minute she returned from the prison visit. While he embraced her, he would make her tell him in detail what she and her husband had just done.

“
I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I get the feeling you’re queer for Harv.”

“
I’m queer for you,” he said. “I can’t get enough of you. I could kill you, I could cook you and eat you, and I still couldn’t get enough.”

“
Don’t talk that way.”

“
I could suck the marrow out of your bones. Still wouldn’t be enough.”

The more time he spent with Joanie Jellin, the more certain he grew that Marie was having an affair. “He’s nailing her,” he told me, “and he’s doing it right in my own house. I walk in there and I can feel it. The air’s thick and heavy, like he’s still there in spirit.”

“
You like getting Joanie right after Harv’s done with her,” I pointed out. “Maybe you should tell Marie to skip her shower after.”

I was joking, but he didn’t see the humor, and I thought he was going to lose it altogether. “She’s my wife,” he said. “Somebody touches my wife, I rip his fucking heart out. I cut his dick off, stuff it down her throat and let her fucking choke on it.”

He became convinced not only that Marie had a lover, but that the man coordinated his visits to coincide with his own overnight stays with Joanie. He set a trap, telling Marie the same thing he told her whenever Jellin had a conjugal visit scheduled. He had to escort a prisoner who’d been extradited to another state, he told her, and he’d be gone overnight.

Then he staked out his own house, waiting. And of course he never saw a single suspicious car. Marie never left the house, and no one came to visit her.

The next morning, when he walked into his house, he was utterly certain someone had been with her. “Who was it?” he shouted at her. “Tell me who it was!”

“
I’ve been here all night,” she said, looking at him like he was crazy. “Alone, in a robe, watching tv. And then I went to bed. Michael, don’t they have somebody you can see? Like a psychiatrist? Because I think you should seriously consider it.”

“
He must have seen my car,” he told me. “Must have parked around the block, sneaked through the yards and went in the back door, then got out the same way.”

“
Maybe you’re imagining things, Mike.”

“
I don’t think so. Partner, you gotta help me out. Tuesday, when Harv has his next visit? What I want you to do is check my block. He won’t recognize your car.”

“
I don’t know what you’ve got planned for this guy,” I said, “but I don’t want to be a part of it.”

“
Believe me,” he said, “I want him all for myself. All I want from you is a plate number. I can take it from there.”

He drove off on Tuesday, and when I met him Wednesday afternoon he looked like he was running on empty. “Too much bed and not enough sleep,” he said. “Remember the first time I laid eyes on Joanie? That was all it took for me to know what was waiting there for me. She’s amazing.”

“
Maybe you could divorce Marie,” I suggested. “Marry Joanie, have her all for yourself.”

He looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “Number one,” he said, “Marie’s my wife. That makes her mine forever. Number two, why would I want to marry Joanie? There’s the kind of women you marry and the kind you don’t, and she’s definitely one you don’t.” He shook his head at my naiveté. “If you were married yourself,” he said, “you’d know what I was talking about. Listen, did you do what I asked you to do? Did you find out anything?”

I lowered my eyes. “Bad news,” I said.

“
I knew it!”

“
She had a visitor.”

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I fucking knew it. At the house?”

I nodded. “He was there for two hours. Then I had to leave, but he was still there when I checked back around dawn.”

“
The son of a bitch.”

“
I ran his plate,” I said. “I got a name and address.”

“
You’re a pal,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

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I wanted to,” I told him. “Waiting out there, thinking about what was going on inside your house, I started getting mad at him myself. I don’t know what you’ve got planned for him, and I don’t want to horn in on it, but I think I ought to be there to watch your back.”

“
Let’s go,” he said, then stopped himself. “Maybe I should stop home first,” he said. “Light her up a little, then drop in on lover boy.”

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Of course, if you can tell her how you’ve already gone and cleaned his clock. . .”

“
You’re right,” he said. “Cut off his dick, walk in and tell her I brought her a present. Maybe I’ll put it in a box and giftwrap it so I can get a look at her face when she opens it. ‘What’s this, Michael? It looks familiar. . .’ ”

“
Be something to see,” I agreed.

I made a phone call and we got in the squad car. On our way he said, “You’re a damn good friend, you know that? And you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get her to fuck you.”

For a second I thought he meant his wife.

“
She’ll do anything I tell her to do,” he said. “Crazy bitch is wild. We’ll team up on her, turn her every way but loose.”

I didn’t know what to say.

We drove across town to a dead-end street in the old Tannery district. It was a bad block, and the address I had wasn’t the best house on it. It was a little square box of a house, with some of the window panes broken and weeds poking up through the litter on the front lawn. The paint job was so far gone it was hard to say what color it was.

“
Better Homes and Gardens,” Walbeck said. “I can see why he likes to spend the night at my place, the son of a bitch.”

“
That’s his car,” I said, pointing to a Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a crumpled fender and a busted taillight.

“
He parked that piece of shit on my street? You’d think he would have been ashamed.”

He led the way, marched right up to the front door. He put a hand on the butt of his service revolver and made a fist of the other. “Police!” be bellowed, as he pounded on the door. Then, before anyone could open it, he drew back his foot and kicked it in.

The shotgun blast picked him up and blew him back onto the front porch.

I was standing to the side when the gun went off, and I already had my own revolver drawn. The weasel-faced little guy in the broken-down armchair had triggered both barrels, and I didn’t give him time to reload. I put three slugs in his chest, and they told me later that two of them got the heart and the third didn’t miss it by much. He was dead before the shots quit echoing.

I knelt down beside my partner. He was still breathing, but he’s taken a double load of buckshot and he was on his way out. But it was important to tell him this before he was gone.

“
I’m the one,” I said. “I’ve been dicking your wife for months, you dumb shit. It was fun, putting one over on you, but finally we both got sick of having you around.”

I was looking at his eyes as I spoke, and he got it, he took it in. But he didn’t hang on to it for long. A moment later his eyes glazed and he was gone.

#
For a long moment the room was silent, but for the crackling of the fire and an impressive rumbling from the bowels of the old man dozing over his book. “There’s a metaphor,” the doctor said. “Life is just one long dream, punctuated by the occasional fart.”

“
That’s quite a story, Policeman,” the soldier said. “Quite a story to tell on yourself.”