WORK IN HOMICIDE AS long as I have, certain themes emerge. You get where you can spot what the crime’s about, and mostly it’s one of three categories. Money, sex, ambition. This one now, it was all three. Depending on who you were talking to. It was money for the loser that helped. For her, ambition. But for the poor slob that did the husband in for her, it was sex of course.
Sex now. You put sex into a situation and everything changes. A woman wants to get out of her marriage. Her husband doesn’t want a divorce. She’s got to dump him, but he’s holding on. Nobody knows what to do. Then sex enters in. She gets a sixteen-year-old boyfriend. Now she’s crossed a line. Broken the rules. Once she’s done that, it’s an easy step to the next point. Once she’s already taken her clothes off, danced for him in her garter belt, once she’s let him screw her, anything can happen. After that they both know what an act it is, going around looking like regular citizens. Once you’ve heard the crazy things a person says in bed with another person and you’ve thought the crazy things a person thinks when it’s happening, it’s like you’ve entered into this other country where no more laws exist. Once sex gets into the picture, you can never go back to being one of those other kind of people that act like they don’t ever sweat. I mean, under these clothes we’re wearing, we’re all just a bunch of animals, aren’t we? Once two people have sex they can’t pretend different anymore.
So after she screwed him I figure the next step was easy enough. Now that they’ve done whatever particular odd thing it was that turned them on, what’s the big deal about taking him aside one day and saying, “Suppose we get a gun and blow my old man away?” Easy enough to start talking about buying bullets and making it look like a burglary, once you’ve done the other.
And for his part—we’re speaking of the boy now—you might just as well give a sixteen-year-old boy crack cocaine as give him a nice-looking twenty-five-year-old woman to fuck. He’s going to be a slave, you understand? A fucking slave. He’ll do anything just to get in her pants again. Fix your car? Mow your lawn? Kill your husband? Sure. He’s got to have it, you understand? Got to.
Nobody likes to say this, but we all know it’s true. Sex is just so bizarre. Here we all are, walking around going to the supermarket, making bank deposits, shooting the breeze with someone over at the barber shop about our car. Acting like we’re all normal. Everybody keeps up the act. How’s it going? Just great. How about you?
And the whole time we’re doing this, we’ve got this other life going on—the life you live beyond closed doors, alone, or not alone, in the dark, when you’re just a naked body, burning up with animal desires. Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is strange? Tell me, am I the only one who notices?
I go register my car. Woman at the Division of Motor Vehicles hands me a form, sticks her pen behind her ear, types up the form. “Another hot one,” she says to me. “Think it’ll ever rain?” You can tell she’s just come from the beauty parlor. She has these little pearl earrings on. Wedding ring. Photos of the kids on her desk.
But what I’m thinking is, What does she look like when she’s got her girdle off and some guy on top of her? Does she go home at night, put on cutout panties and a pair of handcuffs, and wait for her best friend’s husband to come over? Or lie there alone listening to old Frank Sinatra records and touching herself? Let’s face it, once you throw sex into the equation, anyone out there can become crazy. We’re all capable of bizarre behavior. Who follows the rules? What are the rules anyway?