Irresistible Impulse by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

fifty-seven going on ninety, a solid, cylindrical Italian-American man with a tan, wrinkled face like a grocery bag left out for a month in the sun and rain. His eyes, deeply socketed, were still, black, holding no hope, void of compassion. A hard case, Harry. He didn’t drink anymore, but on the other hand, as far as Marlene knew, he had not done any of the Twelve Steps either. Harry had until recently been a detective with the N.Y.P.D. There are around four thousand of these, of whom somewhat over a hundred occupy the highest rank, detective first grade. Harry Bello had been one of them, elite of the elite, for which reason, when Harry’s wife had contracted a particularly miserable form of cancer, and Harry had started to drink heavily, and been drunk when his partner of fifteen years had gone into a building alone on a routine canvass and been killed, and Harry had drunkenly hunted down and executed a kid who may or may not have been the murderer, the Department had pulled a cloak over the affair and assigned Harry to a meaningless job and waited for him to drink himself to death or eat his gun. At that point, however, Marlene had casually extended a hand, which Harry, for reasons Marlene had never quite understood, had gripped with a dead man’s grip. Harry was Lucy’s godfather, a role he took with sometimes frightening seriousness, as if this antique commitment represented his sole remaining link with the human community, a reason for not becoming in actuality what he often resembled around the eyes, a corpse. During the period when he had worked for Marlene at the D.A.’s Rape Bureau, they had called him the Doberman. Before that, when he was still a cop, he was known as Dead Harry.
    Meanwhile, there was that remarkable brain at Marlene’s disposal, and a protective will that, while focused mainly on Lucy, spread its penumbra also over the mother, in a way that often pinched, as now.
    She said, “I don’t see why we should change anything, Harry. Honestly, you worry too much. We’re doing okay.”
    “Marlene, I went over this,” said Harry in his tired voice. “Domestics are poison. Either you got some guys want to whack out their women decide to punch your ticket while they’re at it, or you keep on trying to reason with the same kind of guys, and things heat up, and you whack them out, which puts you up in Bedford on a felony.”
    “None of that has happened, Harry.”
    “You don’t have cancer either, but I notice you’re trying to quit smoking. I’m thinking of the kid here, Marlene. Leave that kind of shit to the cops, is what I’m saying. That’s what they get paid for.”
    “God, between you and my husband!” Marlene cried. “Okay, you want out? You’re getting nervous in your old age? Good! I’ll work it by myself.”
    Harry held up a mollifying hand. “Marlene, I didn’t say that. Look, this is getting to be a broken record. I got no problem with the protection program. Tennis players, the loonies and the celebrities, fine, okay. The others, help with protection orders, moving them into apartments, the shelters. You want to keep doing that, we can handle it. It’s a business. But …” Here he paused.
    “But, what , Harry?”
    “No more setups. That’s out. And no more Polaroids on the assholes.”
    Marlene took a deep breath. Another. “Okay, fine, Harry, you made your point. I won’t involve you.”
    Harry stared at her for a moment and then nodded once. He had made his point, and Marlene would do what she was going to do. She might keep doing setups, which was where she used a stalked woman as bait and when the stalker came after her, armed, performed the justifiable homicide, which was the only way to make sure some (admittedly, a small fraction) of men engaged in this activity would never do it again. Or she might still get some other people she knew to pay visits to guys who pounded their wives, and show the guys Polaroids of what the women looked like at the emergency