Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

I was with him when he first caught sight of her. It was at a basketball game. Someone had given him tickets and he invited me to come along. I didn’t much like to hang out with Walbeck, I got enough of him on the job, but I like basketball and these were good seats. A few minutes into the first period he elbowed me and pointed. “The redhead,” he said, “Third row up and on the aisle.”

“What about her?”

“I gotta have her,” he said.

She was a striking woman, with a lush body and strong facial features. Flaming red hair, and that pale skin redheads have, the ones that don’t have freckles. I admired her myself, but it wasn’t a matter of admiration with Walbeck. He took one look at her and decided he had to have her.

“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.

“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.

“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 goddamn 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.”