Johnny Porno

Chapter 24

They were sitting in Detective Brice’s yellow Ford Mustang Mach I. It was a few minutes before noon. The sun was strong. Detective Levin shielded his eyes from the glare.

“Who’s this guy?” he asked.

“We’ll know after we call it in,” Brice said. He wrote down the Buick’s license tags on his Daily News.

Levin wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his free hand. He held a can of Coke in the other. “It gets any hotter, you’ll have to use some gas and turn on the air conditioner,” he said.

Brice flipped down his sun visor. “It’s no good for the engine to run the AC sitting here like this,” he said. “Besides, you could always take off the shirt you’re wearing over a T-shirt.”

“The T-shirt absorbs the sweat or I’d get stains like you.”

Brice repositioned the sun visor and glanced at the sweat stain under his right arm.

“That’s five cars so far,” Levin said.

“And Berg was out to meet every one of them,” Brice said. “Change of plans, I guess.”

“I wonder it has anything to do with that big, fat warning we gave him the other day.”

“You’re still on that kick, huh?”

“Where’s Kelly?”

“Said he’d be here.”

“Except he isn’t.”

“You still out tomorrow?”

“For my cousin’s wedding,” Levin said.

“Since when do Jews marry on a Sunday?”

“He’s marrying a shiksa,” Levin said. He saw Brice was eyeing him. “One of yours,” Levin added. “A gentile. They always get married on weekends. Sundays if they’re cheap.”

Brice turned to watch the Buick again. “I’m not looking forward to this tomorrow, being alone with Kelly. He holds my age against me.”

“Overbearing is he?”

“He’s alright when you’re around, with me, I mean, but that’s because he doesn’t like you.”

“Why they call us the chosen people,” Levin said.

Brice was still watching the Buick. He pointed to it when it pulled away from the curb in front of George Berg’s house.

“Whoever it was, the car can use some bodywork,” he said.

They had been parked since nine o’clock in the morning. Levin finished his soda and put the empty can in a paper bag.

“Really,” he said. “Either turn the air on a few minutes or I gotta go for a walk to try and cool myself off.”

“In this heat?” Brice said.

“I’ll walk in the shade.”

“Good luck.”

“That mean you won’t turn it on?”

“I told you, it’s not good for the car running the air conditioner while it’s idling.”

“That what Mach One means, you can’t run the air conditioner?”

Brice turned to Levin. “That degree you got, it’s in ballbreaking, right?”

Levin sighed, opened the door and got out. He stretched his arms over his head, yawned and stretched again. When he turned in the direction of George Berg’s house, he could see the owner waving to him from his stoop.

“Nice work,” Brice said.

Levin squatted down alongside the passenger window. “He probably spotted us two minutes after we got here.”

“Yeah, well, now it’s official.”

Levin winked before standing up out of his squat. “I’m going for a walk.”

“While I do my job,” Brice said. “That’s great.”

“I stay here we’ll both be jerking ourselves off,” Levin said. “I’m gonna find a bathroom where I can do it in private.”

They were in bed after having sex first thing in the morning. Billy had been out late the night before and Kathleen had woken up horny. She whispered a dirty story in his ear about a hand job she’d given one of the football players when she was in high school, making up most of it until Billy was hard and then she climbed on top of him. They slept again afterward and didn’t wake up until it was close to noon.

Billy put up a pot of coffee. He was finished with his first cup when Kathleen joined him in the kitchen. She put four slices of bread in the toaster and set out a stick of butter on a plate while Billy retrieved the mail and newspaper from the stoop. She had the toast buttered when he returned. They sat across from one another at the table and sipped their coffees.

After a while Kathleen pointed at his newspaper with her butter knife. “Anything interesting?”

“Not really,” Billy said. He was paging through the New York Post, scanning the articles it looked like.

“What time you get in last night?”

“Pretty late. After two, I think.”

“Closer to three.”

He looked up from the newspaper. “Then what you ask for?”

Kathleen was surprised at his tone. When she looked up, Billy was glaring at her.

“There’s nothing new in the world,” he said. “Lots and lots of bullshit is all.”

She nervously dipped one end of a piece of toast into her coffee and took a bite. She wiped her mouth with a napkin before looking up at him again.

“Maybe we should call a realtor,” she said.

It was something she had been thinking about, selling their house and starting over someplace else. Now that he wasn’t a cop anymore, they had options.

“Sure,” Billy said, “except I have something to do later.”

“When?”

“Around three.”

“Then I should call soon. At least to get an idea of the market value.”

“I already know that. One-twenty, tops, this neighborhood. Probably more like one-five or one flat.”

“You looked into it?”

“Not directly, no. I have an idea, though.”

“One-twenty would give us close to a hundred to buy someplace else,” Kathleen said. “We could get a lot more for our money outside New York.”

Billy nodded but wasn’t paying attention. He seemed to be reading something.

“I’d still like to get an estimate,” Kathleen said. “You think they’d come today? I’d have to clean up some.”

“They aren’t gonna care if the dishes are done, Kathleen.”

“I don’t want somebody coming in with the place a mess.”

She was waiting for his attention, but Billy was focused on whatever he was reading.

“Billy?”

“It’s not a mess,” he said. “If we’re just looking for an appraisal, you don’t need to scrub the joint.”

It bothered her that he was so preoccupied. She knew he wasn’t looking for a job. It was something else and it made her uneasy.

“Or we could borrow off it until you find work,” she said.

“Re-mortgage? I’d rather not go that route.”

“Then I should work.”

“No.”

“I’m getting bored anyway. I’m at the gym five days a week, mostly from boredom. I need something to do. I might as well get paid for it.”

Billy stared at her again.

“You’re bored, are you?” he said.

“I’m just saying.”

“Just saying what?”

“I can help with the bills.”

“And then you wouldn’t be bored.”

“What?”

“Maybe you just need to get out and about,” he said. “A change of scenery, make your day more exciting.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t, did you?”

Billy was back to staring at her. This time she felt a chill.

“You’re not working,” he said. “Not ever.”

Kathleen looked away.

“Money’s fine,” he said. “Stop worrying about it.”

She picked up her coffee and sipped again. She had been suspicious of Billy’s whereabouts the last few times he left the house. He used to tell her he couldn’t say where he was going because of his undercover work, but now that he was a civilian again she had hoped the secrecy would end and it hadn’t.

“I’ve been thinking about someplace warm,” she said. “To live, I mean. Someplace where it doesn’t snow.”

“But not Florida, right?”

“No, definitely not Florida.”

He folded the newspaper in half and leaned both elbows on the table. “Where then? Where warm?”

“I don’t know. California? Arizona? New Mexico, maybe.”

“Somewhere west, huh?”

“Why not?”

“Might be okay,” Billy said. “Certainly lots of hard bodies out there, young guys looking to pick up good-looking divorcees off the beaches in California.”

Either he was picking a fight or providing the outline for a new sex story. Sometimes he did that, suggested something that turned him on and then she’d have to fictionalize it so he could get off.

She wasn’t in the mood, though, and pointed to the newspaper he’d been reading. “You done with that?”

Billy pushed the Post across the table.

Kathleen unfolded it, licked her right thumb and index fingers to turn the first page.

“I’ll bet they’d love that, the lifeguards on a beach out there,” Billy said. “Seeing that red patch of yours through the white bikini I like.”

He had become a voyeur over time. First it was through her retelling her sexual past that had turned him on. Then he asked her to act out what she had done with other men, sometimes using vibrators and sometimes, like the other day, using nothing at all. Over time, whether real or imagined, it became obvious that it was the image of his wife being turned on that excited Billy most.

She was still looking through the newspaper when she saw a name she recognized, Victor Vasquez. She picked up the paper and brought it closer to read the article.

“What’s up?” Billy asked.

Kathleen didn’t hear him. She read about a funeral mass taking place at a church near Starrett City in Brooklyn. Victor Vasquez, devoted husband and father of three girls, had been killed a few days ago in a park in Canarsie.

Kathleen had been involved with Vasquez for a short time three years earlier. It was the first affair she had confessed to Billy and was also the first she’d recorded in the notebook.

“What?” Billy asked.

“Somebody killed Victor Vasquez.”

“Your Victor Vasquez?”

Kathleen looked up. “Yes.”

“Don’t look at me,” Billy said. “I didn’t do it.”

She was searching for a sign that he was lying or telling the truth, but couldn’t find one.

Then Billy said, “And if I did? Would you leave me, Kathleen? Would you betray me… again?”

She wasn’t sure anymore so she didn’t answer.

“Did you?” she asked instead.

“You want that other slice of toast?” Billy said.