Lawrence Block - Speaking of Lust

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 naivete. “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.”

“ 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.”

“ 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.”

“ 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.”

“ It happened a long time ago,” the policeman said.

“ And you set the whole thing up. Who was the man with the shotgun?”

“ He was wanted in three states,” the policeman said, “for robbery and murder, and he’d sworn he would never be taken alive. One of my snitches told me where he was holed up.”

“ And the rest of it was your doing,” the priest said.

The policeman nodded. “Mea culpa, Priest. The call I made before we rolled was to the station, to let them know we were investigating a tip on a fugitive. I let the perp gun down Walbeck, and then I took him out before he could do the same for me.”

“ And made sure to tell your partner what had happened.”

“ I wanted him to know,” the policeman said.

“ And it was true, what you said? You’d been with his wife for months?”

“ For a few months, yes. Not as long as he’d been suspicious of her. His suspicions were groundless at first, but I was intrigued, and filled with some sort of righteous indignation at the way he was treating her. I’d have been less outraged, I’m sure, if I hadn’t deep down wanted to have her myself.”

“ And how long did you have her, Policeman?”

“ When I set up her husband,” he said, “I thought I’d wait a decent interval and marry the woman. But over the next several weeks I came to see why Walbeck cheated on her. It turned out the woman was a pain in the ass. The affair ran its course and ended, and she married someone else.”

“ And you didn’t worry she would let slip how you’d arranged her husband’s death?”

“ She never knew,” the policeman said. “As far as she was concerned, it was a death in the line of duty. He got a medal awarded posthumously and she got a generous widow’s pension.”

“ Because she was such a generous widow,” the doctor suggested. “Did the old fellow fart again?”

“ I think that was the fire.”