Catch and Release Paperback

by Lawrence Block

  “Or else they’d have been swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool,” said the doctor, “and that’s dangerous, but not always disastrous. On the one hand you’ve got the Jukes and the Kallikaks, those horrible examples they tell you about in high school biology class, and on the other hand you’ve got all the crowned heads of Europe.”

  “When we have more time,” the policeman said, “you can tell me which is worse. Any more to the story, Priest?”

  The priest shook his head. “I was transferred shortly thereafter,” he said, “and lost track of them. I hope things turned out well for them. I liked them.”

  “And I like your story,” the policeman said. “Lust. I could tell a story about lust.”

  The others sat back, waiting.

  * * *

  I’m not much of a storyteller (said the policeman) and I don’t know much about sin. Not that I’m free from it myself, but that I was not trained to think in those terms. My frame of reference is the law, the criminal code specifically. I can tell you whether or not an act is lawful, and, if it’s not, I can correctly label it a violation or a misdemeanor or a felony. And even then my classification will not apply universally, but only in the jurisdiction where I lived and worked.

  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 dicks, 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.

  “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.”

  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 on
ly 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?”