Slob

The first time together

She had forgotten what it was like to wait for the phone to ring. Just as he'd forgotten what it was like to have to build up your nerve to do something. Two more unlikely people never waited to make a date. Both of them long beyond the dating stage. Marriages. Children. Whole histories and lives that the other one couldn't possibly fit into. Just insanity, she thought. And she wondered, for the third or fourth time, when he was going to call her.

He was so damn excited getting ready to go see them that it started irritating him and for a few moments he almost considered calling the whole thing off. He was rushing around trying to get dressed here like it was for a night on the town with a movie star and he was taking some housewife and her kid to some burger joint or whatever. Get a hold of yourself. He took a final look at himself in the, mirror, said to hell with it, and tried to keep from running to the car.

No matter how much he told himself that it was purely comical, he couldn't dampen the excitement he felt and the warmth that spread through him at the thought of seeing this woman again. Unordinary was the word that kept coming to mind. This was some unordinary woman he was having dinner with tonight. He caught himself humming with the radio and shook his head at the rearview mirror as he sped through all the lawbreakers hurrying home after a hard day at the office.

He seemed to get there a lot faster than he remembered, and his heart was pounding when he pulled up in front of the suburban Lynch home and got out of the car. She and Lee Anne both heard the car door and Lee yelled out,

"Somebody's coming," as her mother went to the door.

She opened the door and smiled as he came up the walkway and said, "Hi."

"Hello." His heart was in his throat. "Hungry?"

"Always." She was completely staggered by the look of him and he was poleaxed right out of his shoes at the sight of her. Neither of them had anything to say and they just stood there dumbly in the doorway as a little face peered around her mother's skirt and said, "Hi."

"Hi, Lee Anne. You hungry?"

"Sure."

"We're ready unless you'd like to come in for a drink first."

"No thanks. I'm set if you guys are." And they headed for the car.

"Where are we gonna go?"

"Anywhere you say, Lee Anne. What sounds good to you?"

"Show Biz."

"What's that?"

"You get pizza. You know. And there's these—uh, mechanical animals, uh—and— "

"Maybe Jack doesn't like pizza. Maybe he'd like to go somewhere else."

"Show Biz sounds good." Lee Anne was obviously pleased at the prospect.

In the car he and Lee Anne had a long conversation, Lee leaning over the seat with her head between them as she answered all of his questions up to a point. He was trying to be conversational but it had been a long time since he'd spent much time in the company of a little child. He was inadvertently doing his cop thing as he rapped with her and for a short while she was polite and tried to respond to the mini-interrogation.

"So. You sound like you've been busy since I saw you last. What do you do besides go to school?"

"Do?"

"You know, where do you go, like, at night after school. Do you have meetings? Do you go to church?"

"Yeah."

"Lee," Edie prodded, "tell Jack what you do on Monday night."

"Monday night I go to piano and Wednesday is GA, and—"

"GA?"

"Girls in Action. You know—church?"

"Um-hmm. Good. And what else?" he asked absentmindedly.

"Thursday is Brownies. That's enough!" Edie sank down into the seat. But Eichord only laughed.

"Yeah. You're right. That's plenty," he said smoothly, calmly, and guiding the conversation as he did so easily, and they were talking about something else.

By the time they'd scarfed up the pizza and some of the atmosphere and Lee Anne was already getting anxious to go visit her friend, the child of Edie's best friend at whose home she'd be baby-sat this evening, Lee and Eichord were really hitting it off. Jack thought she had to be one of the friendliest kids and the brightest youngsters he'd ever met and they were both pretty impressed with the other. Edie thought that's the way it is with eight-year-olds they either love ya' or they don't and this one was thataway about this cop. When they headed for the car, the little girl reached for Jack's hand and so it was only natural that he also took Edie's hand and they walked down the sidewalk that way all holding hands.

The first touch of the fingers and then holding each other's hand was like plugging their fingers into a light socket. They wanted each other but there was no sense of pressure, it was something each of them knew was coming and they knew it was going to be good, and it was just a question of the right moment. One of those times when it's not in question at all, really, even though neither one of them had made any kind of a thing about it.

The electricity between them was a living thing that flowed down through their arms and into each other's bodies and it was so beautiful that Eichord loved the moment and tried to will it to just go on and on with the three of them walking like that toward a rented car, him holding hands with this lady he barely knew and her little girl, all plugged into some inexplicable, surging electric current and inanely he thought about the old gal who told him she had electricity flowing through her and he felt like saying, "Doesn't everybody?" And inside his head he let out a silent whoop of pleasure, stopping it before it could get out around his grin, and he looked over at Edie and she was smiling too as they walked to the car touching.

This rush of energy was setting both of them on fire and it was, probably a good thing the kid was in the backseat, Eichord thought, or I'd be all over this woman like some kid in a goddamn drive-in. That thought was enough to calm him down a little bit and she could see him visibly withdraw just a notch when they got in the car and she sat very still and tried to think about anything. What did she think about normally? For just that moment she felt like someone else had invaded her skin. She wasn't used to any of this and she wasn't sure that she liked it. And that's the way it went for the next fifteen minutes or so until they got Lee tucked away at Sandi and Mike's.

She said she didn't care what they did and she let him pick a movie and he didn't care either and he'd seen a pair of twin cinemas on the way to get the pizza and so he headed back in that general direction, driving automatically as work and The Job intruded on the evening. His thoughts turned to the latest murder, a wealthy and influential head of one of Chicago's oldest corporate law firms. What triggered it was he had picked up one of the papers and tried to find a movie he thought she'd like, and in tiny print some art house was advertising CLASSIC SERIAL MURDERS and he did a double take and went back and read in fine print CLASSIC SERIAL TRAILERS and this is what he remembered as they drove along in silence.

Two flake cops named McCluskey and Scheige had caught Charles Maitland while they were playing Hawaii Five-O over at the First. Every day they'd play something, these flakes. Like one day they'd be Kikes 'n Robbers, and all day long it would be Jew and Nazi gags. And today it was all TV cop crap, Columbo and Kojak bits all day long. And McCluskey was closest to the phone when it rang in Homicide and on the first ring Scheige had gone,

"That could be the phone."

And his partner went, "McGarrett, Five-Oh?" like he was answering a phone, and then smoothly picked up the receiver and said "Homicide," breaking Scheige up, and then listening and hanging up and telling his partner, "Jesus. Somebody just killed old Charlie Maitland the lawyer. Let's go."

"Well, book him, Dano," Scheige said, pulling on his coat. And within half an hour somebody had Eichord down at the crime scene looking at the old man's fresh corpse, and sniffing around the already-cold trail of another Lonely Hearts murder.

This one was a little different, and not just the MO. The target was W. Charles Maitland II, one of the richest heavy-hitters in Chicago or for that matter Cook County politics. Wealthy, but like so many rich men, power hungry in a profession where power is the abiding lust and common denominator.

As one of the founding senior partners in Symington, Maitland, Eaves, and Cox, he had carefully sculptured a stratum of political machinery that Eichord was told would now come crashing down around the cop shop like so many tumbling boulders in an avalanche of payback. Someone would feel the wrath of the gods, and his new colleagues informed Jack that the trick was to make damn sure the buck didn't stop with them.

Charles Maitland had been the living embodiment of Lord Acton's oft-quoted truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely. He had lobbied in the mecca of corruption, trading in weaknesses and follies, dealing in conflicts of interest and political vulnerabilities, in the foulness of old-time Cook County ward healers, fund-raisers, feather bedders, judges, a couple of congressmen, a senator here, a governor there. Maitland had bought and sold people like rental properties, paying so much down, buying them on paper lock, stock, and porkbarrel, paying them off in time payments, amortizing them, netting thirty, depreciating their corrupt asses, and now this merchant of corruption was dead. Someone had killed him and butchered him within two blocks of one of the most carefully guarded high-rises in Chicago, mutilated Charlie Maitland within TWO BLOCKS OF FUCKING LAKE SHORE DRIVE and people wanted fast answers. There'd be shit rolling downhill and you could count on that, Eichord was told.

The movie was Burt Reynolds in something or other and the other one was something something Part Two, and it all looked so totally irrelevant and predictable and bogus and boring and they just stood out in front of the giant marquee, looking up at the one-sheet for this piece of Hollywood dreck, and he turned to her and said, "Uh . . ." and she looked at him and he locked his little finger with hers and she smiled at him and he said, "Just how badly do you want to see this award-winning motion picture anyway?"

And they both broke up. And he made a couple of other suggestions and she kept holding on to his finger and then they were holding hands and walking back to the car.

The motel couldn't have been worse, first off. It might have been okay if he'd been some cocksman and had planned it all out, rented a nice Best Western or something up front, had the room key, a nice out-of-the-way room, and driven right up to the door. But he'd pulled into the first motel they'd found, some little dumpy Mom and Pop No-Tell Motel, and she'd had to sit there alone in the front seat cooling off while he watched some dour old character who looked like a hype he'd once busted spill ashes all over himself and fumfer around making sure Mr. and Mrs. J. Eichord, Eichord Company, Self-Employed, cash-in-advance, weren't going to get away with the broken twenty-one-inch Zenith in 312. And by the time they got in the room it was like oh good Christ what are we going to do now and the prospect of actually undressing in this fleabag was so depressing and remote that when he sat down on the lumpy bed she went over and sat in the sixteen-dollar sling chair by the window.

There's a little production of hanging coats up that he does, and then he sees her sitting there kind of forlorn and he just goes over and takes her hand, talking soothingly, very softly, talking about nothing, and they're sitting together on the bed and it just doesn't seem that natural to be in a motel room with him, she thinks, but she is a grown woman and nobody's forcing her to do this against her will, and she tries to relax, and he kisses her very softly on the cheek, and then again, and then it begins between them for the very first time.

Very very chaste, unsexy, brother and sisterly smooches. Just holding each other, tentatively, with him doing most of the movement, leaning in to her, exchanging a couple of little-kid-type kisses, and from out of nowhere he's shooting this enormous fucking boner into her leg as they are halfway lying in bed, one of her feet still touching the dirty carpet, and they both break up laughing and that helps some and then he's embarrassed and rolls over on his back wishing it would go away and knowing now what a mistake this whole thing was.

And she can sense that this is a very nice man here, a good man, and they can at least laugh together, and she leans over him now and kisses him softly on the lips, and he says it's all a mistake and she says don't be silly and he says I know you don't want to do this and she goes it's probably bad for a man to get a great, throbbing erection and not—you know—climax, and when a man is aroused like that she should reach an orgasm. You know, it's no big thing. We don't even have to do anything together or make love yet. Why don't you masturbate, and it sounds so silly they both break up again.

But she persists with it and she knows what she's talking about, she says, it's probably bad for you to be aroused and so on and so forth and he says yeah very hoarsely yeah it probably is and she kind of takes things in hand herself and begins rubbing him gently and oh my oh oh oh my godddd GOD-DDDDD that feels so good so wild and now he know he's going to be going off like a rocket and he unbuckles his pants and slides his pants down and the embarrassment is gone and hell, he thinks, let her do it and she has matters in hand. A mercy cuddle, he thinks, that's what this is turning out to be.

"Edie, that's almost it, but don't let the top come up like that. You wanna' keep your hand real slick there, see—and just keep a nice steady movement up and down on it, not too loose and not too tight." I should know, he thinks, after years of devoted whacking off. "Yeah. That's oh that's it! That's more like it. Do that. Oh yeah. Don't-stop!"

Thing about sex. Even when it ain't too good it's great, he thought. And so they began inauspiciously, to say the least, with a mercy jerk.