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.
