Walter Mosley: Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

He had passive, maybe even kind eyes and if he recognized me that fact was hidden behind an honest attempt at sympathy.

“What about him?”

The plainclothes cop tilted his head to the side and I couldn’t help but think that that was the way he spoke to his mother when he’d been bad and had to come to her to confess the breaking of a water glass or leaving a door open, allowing the family pet to escape.

“He expired,” the policeman said.

“Expired?” Lana asked.

“Died.”

“Oh my God,” Lana said, and then she began to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

The news hit me like a bucket of cold water. Finally the intensity of my session with Myron was flushed away.

“I want to see him,” I said.

The electricity was out in the house. Yellow metal stalks with powerful incandescent lamps, brought in by the police, eerily illuminated the sunken all-white living room and the double-wide hall that went past Theon’s bedroom and mine. There was an even stronger light coming from the master bathroom. I could see the shadows of people moving around in there, mumbling words that I couldn’t quite make out.

“Maybe you shouldn’t see him like this,” the plainclothes cop said at the door.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Lieutenant Mendelson.”

“Your first name.”

“Perry.”

“Is that short for something?”

“I was named after Perry Como. My mother loved his voice.”

“Are you married, Perry?”

“Yes. Of, of course.” He said these last three words showing me the wedding band on his left hand.

“If it was your wife in there would you walk away because some stranger told you to?”

The policeman looked down and I instantly liked him. He took a step back and I walked into the huge bathroom.

There were three men and two women in there, all of them wearing blue hairnets and thin rubber gloves. One man was vacuuming the floor with a handheld device while another, a black woman, was taking photographs with a digital camera — bringing Carmen Alia to my mind.

I was further reminded of a porno shoot when I saw the inhabitants of our wide, baby blue circular bathtub.

My husband, Theon Pinkney, was naked on his back with his big belly up above the waterline. His left arm was around Jolie Wins, a sixteen-year-old wannabe adult cinema star.

Jolie was my polar opposite with her black hair and pale white skin. She didn’t look dead.

There was a high-end video camera submerged at the far side of the tub. It was plugged into a wall and had tumbled into the impromptu sex scene that they were filming.

Theon had been a major star in the porn world before he was my husband. He called himself Axel Rod. After he got fat he became a somewhat successful manager before the stars and directors wrested their careers from producers, agents, and managers. Theon probably told Jolie that this was an audition, and he plugged in the camera because the battery had gone dead while he fucked her for hours.

Theon had lost his physical appeal but he could keep up an erection longer than any man I’d ever met.

“Mrs. Pinkney?” Lieutenant Perry Mendelson said.

“Yes?”

There was the sound of a grunting moan in the background. Again I was reminded of my work.

“Are you all right?” the policeman asked.

“Why are the police here, Perry?”

“People have died.”

“But it looks like an accident. Do you think he was murdered?”

“No,” he said. “The way we see it the girl’s foot got tangled in the wire and, and, and when she...”

“When she moved to get on top of him the camera fell in,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then why is half the Pasadena police department in my home?”

“Your housekeeper, Mrs. Julia Slatkin, came in and found them. She called nine-one-one and said that it was murder. When someone claims foul play we are legally obligated to do an initial investigation.”

“I see.”

“Is this your husband?”

“Yes, it is.”

“The housekeeper already ID’d him but I’m required to ask.”

“Where is Julia?”

“She was distraught. I had one of my men drive her home. Do you know the girl, Mrs. Pinkney?”

“No,” I lied. “No, I don’t. Who is she?”

“We didn’t find any identification in her purse.”

“She looks like a child. My husband was having sex with a child.”

Perry Mendelson looked into my eyes and saw a blank slate. I turned away and went to Lana. She was on the floor in the hall, grunting and moaning, crying with an abandon I rarely felt.

I went to her and hunkered down. It was a familiar movement, a sex position without a partner.

I smiled.

“It’s okay, baby,” I said. And then to Perry, who was standing above us, “How long is this investigation going to last?”

“We can wrap it up in a couple of hours. I’ll have some questions but they can wait until tomorrow if you don’t feel up to it right now.”

“That would be great. I’m an early riser. And, Perry?”

“Yes?”

“If you don’t think it’s a crime you can have them take Theon’s body to Threadley Brothers Mortuary. There’s somebody there all night.”

That night Lana and I lay side by side on white satin sheets under black cashmere blankets. I didn’t really need the company, but Lana was a delicate girl and too upset to drive herself home.

She snored softly and pressed against me. I didn’t sleep much but that wasn’t unusual. I hadn’t had a full night’s rest in many years. It wasn’t that I was sad or even insomniac. I just didn’t seem to need that much sleep. Usually when Theon and I were both home he’d have sex with me and then drop off. For most of the night I’d read books at random, napping at odd times between chapters or sections; sometimes I’d even nod off in the middle of a sentence.

Over the years I read Tolstoy and Tennyson, Mary Higgins Clark and John Updike, Roger Zelazny and Octavia Butler in the early, early hours of the morning. I didn’t finish as many books as some because I usually put down a story I didn’t like and reread, many times over, those that I enjoyed.

If Theon woke up and found me reading he’d usually fuck me again. That was his talent — he could have sex anytime with anyone. If he didn’t like burritos and cheesecake so much he could have been a porn star up into his seventies.

But the reason he had sex didn’t have to do with love or the physical passion I’d felt that afternoon with Myron. Sex for Theon always had a definite purpose, like when he’d drowsily awake and see me reading. I was a herd mare and he was an aging stallion running with all his might to keep up.

I’d lie under him or get on my knees and move perfectly with his thrusts and withdrawals. After he’d come I’d turn him on his side and scrape his skin with my fake nails and bite his shoulders. And after a while he’d fall back to sleep and I’d pick up my book again.

Theon and I loved each other, I suppose. I knew him better than anyone else did and he never hit me. He had sex with other women all the time and I was free to do what I wanted, but that wasn’t very often, not really. I wasn’t worried about losing him, because sex was just a release or a means to an end for him. Theon told me that he didn’t want me falling in love with another man, or woman. I told him that he didn’t have to worry.

He was especially concerned that I didn’t fall in love with a black man. He was white and believed that the races tended to stay together and so felt threatened whenever I spent any time with any of my African American costars.

That night, after Theon’s ridiculous death, lying there next to Lana — her rough breath like hope or something — I wanted to read but didn’t have the strength to sit up or even reach over to the night table where Dead Souls was sitting, waiting for me to reread it for the seventh, or maybe eighth time.