Lawrence Block: Speaking of Lust

Determining what is or is not a criminal act is difficult enough. Determining whether or not an act is sinful, well, I wouldn’t want to touch that with a stick.

Lust…

When I was still a young man, I was partnered with an older man named-well, let me choose a name for him, as the priest chose a name for his young couple. And I ought to be able to come up with something a little more distinctive and imaginative than William Thompson, don’t you think? Michael Walbeck, that’s what we’ll call my partner. Michael J. Walbeck, and the J stands for John. No, make it Jonathan. Michael Jonathan Walbeck, and everybody called him Mike, except for his mother, who still called him Mickey, and his wife, who called him Michael.

She was a beauty, his wife. Her hair was a heap of black curls that spilled down over her shoulders, and her face was heart-shaped, with dark almond-shaped eyes and a lush mouth. Walbeck was jealous of her. He’d call her eight or ten times a day, just to make sure he knew where she was. As far as I knew, Marie never gave him cause for jealousy, outside of always looking like she just hopped out of bed, and like she was ready at a moment’s notice to hop back in again. But he didn’t need cause. He was just a jealous man.

Meanwhile, he was running around on her. Here he was, talking about how he’d kill her if he ever caught her with another guy, and how he’d kill the guy, too, and at the same time he always had something going on the side, and sometimes more than one thing.

You’ve heard of guys who go through life following their own dick, and that was Walbeck. He said himself that he’d screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’m not entirely certain he was exaggerating. He’d roust hookers and let them off in return for a quick blow job-it’s safe to say he wasn’t the first cop who thought of that one-but his real specialty was the wives and girlfriends of criminals.

That’s a little harder than getting a hooker to go down on you, but not by much. The first time I saw Mike in action, we had busted a guy who was cooking crank in his double-wide out on the edge of town. That’s methamphetamine, also known as speed, and it’s about as tricky to make as chili con carne. And cooking it’s a felony in fifty states, and we had this poor bastard dead to rights. His rights were what Mike was reading him, as a matter of fact, but he stopped in midsentence when he got a look at Cheryl.

I don’t know if she was his wife or his girlfriend, and I don’t remember her name, so for all I know it could have been Cheryl. Doesn’t matter. She was a blowsy girl, and in a few years she’d be a real porker, but now she was in her early twenties and she looked hot and sluttish. She had a wrapper on, I remember, and it needed laundering, and you could pretty much tell she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

“ Nice looking girl,” Walbeck told the mope. “You know, I wonder if there’s a way we can work something out.”

The guy got it before it touched the ground. “You see anything you like,” he said, “it’s yours.”

“ She’s got to do us both,” Walbeck said. “Me and my partner here.”

“ You got it.”

“ Eddie-” the girl said, whining.

“ Shut up,” he told her. “Like you’re gonna miss it?”

“ She’s got some shape on her,” Walbeck said. “She does us both, including we get to fuck her in the ass.”

“ No way,” the girl said.

“ I said shut up,” Eddie said. “You do that, I get to keep the stuff.”

“ The crank.”

“ The crank and the money both. You don’t confiscate nothing, and I walk, and for that you can fuck her anywhere you want. Cut a hole in her chest and fuck her in the heart, all I care.”

“ Eddie!”

“ Deal,” Walbeck said. He asked me if I wanted to go first. I shook my head and waited outside with Eddie, who professed not to care what was going on inside the trailer. I noticed, though, that he lit one cigarette off the butt of another, and smoked as if he wanted to burn up the whole cigarette in one furious drag.

“ He’s a prick,” he said. “That partner of yours.” I said something to the effect that nobody’d forced him to go for the deal. “Oh, it’s a good deal,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. She ain’t gonna miss another slice off the loaf, and who gives a shit about her anyway? But he’s still a prick.”

Walbeck was in there long enough for Eddie to smoke three cigarettes, and he was zipping his pants as he came down the trailer steps. “Nice,” he said, grinning. “I can see why you keep her around. You’re up, partner.”

You pass in a situation like that, you make trouble in your partnership. Like if you bend the rules for a storekeeper on your beat, let his suppliers park illegally when they’re making their deliveries, and he slips you a few bucks out of gratitude. If one partner takes it and the other won’t accept his cut, how are they going to get along?

So I managed a grin of my own and went up the steps and into the trailer. I wasn’t really in the mood, so I figured I’d just sit around long enough for the guy outside to suck down a few more cigarettes while Walbeck broke his balls some more. But I figured without the woman. I got one look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed with her soiled wrapper hanging open in front, her face and attitude showing vulnerability and sluttishness in equal proportion, and just like that I wanted her. My head thought I ought to be above such things, but my dick had a mind of its own.

She gave me a sad smile and took off the wrapper, and that settled that. I got out of my clothes, and she looked at me and her face clouded. “Jesus,” she said, “you’re about twice as big as your friend. I hope you don’t want to stick it the same place he did.”

I told her the conventional route would do.

“ You’re nice,” she said. “Go slow so I can really get into it, and you’ll be glad you did.”

Afterward, we stopped at a pay phone and Walbeck called his house. He talked to his wife, but that wasn’t enough reassurance, and he insisted we take a run past his house to see if there was a strange car in the driveway. There wasn’t, but two doors down on the other side of the street he spotted a car he didn’t recognize, and right away he called a guy he knew at DMV and ran the plate. The car was registered to a man named Shoenstahl, with a residence listed across town, but there was a family on Walbeck’s street with the same name, so it was probably a relative, and not some bastard nailing Walbeck’s wife.

“ You can’t trust them,” he told me. “Look at that choice specimen of trailer trash we were just with. Once you get past the surface, they’re all like that.”

I could have put in for a transfer, but Walbeck wasn’t the worst partner in the world. The tail-chasing and the jealousy weren’t endearing traits, but in other respects he was a fairly decent cop, and not as much of a pain in the ass to be harnessed with as some of them. I got used to him, and then he took the whole thing to another level when he met a woman I’ll call Joanie.

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.