When We Were Married Ch. 06C

"I knew Sally could have walked in, you could have, the Big Man could have, my career might have been over and my marriage probably would have been over, yet I didn't try to stop her. I noticed that Gary had unzipped and he was standing beside us. She started alternating. I...I'd never seen anything like that except in a porno, and it was happening in my office."

"Then she stopped and stood up. She reached over, grabbed a pen off my desk and wrote a number on a memo pad on my desk. She wiped her mouth and walked to the door of my office."

"She said, 'I'm going to be at the Hyatt Regency in that room. I'll be there until 7 and I'll spend the night if either of you gentleman is inclined to spend it with me. I hope you won't stand me up. I am very, very aroused right now. Oh, and no strings attached. This has nothing to do with Paul. I just need to be fucked'."

"Then she walked out. Gary and I looked at each other. It was a little embarrassing, like jerking off in front of another guy but, I didn't care at that point. I told Sally I was out on a case, called Darlene and told her I had to work late and drove over to the Hyatt. I didn't leave there until 10 p.m. I showered before I left because the whole room stunk of sex. Then I went home to Darlene."

I looked at him and just shook my head.

"That's one hell of a story. Not the smartest thing for a married top Assistant to do but, you didn't make her any promises and there wasn't any talk about a deal for her husband, was there? You didn't do anything at the hotel that would cause people to remember you, did you? Maybe - just maybe - we can slide by on this. Edwards doesn't need to know, and she's got no hold on you, although she could still make trouble for us if she wanted to. Dave, I have to tell you, I expected more sense from you. I can understand Gary, he's younger and single."

Brandon lowered his head. When he looked up I thought he was going to cry. Right then I started getting a very bad feeling.

"On Saturday I was at home watching the kids while Darlene was out shopping, thank God. Jerry was playing video games and the girls were watching a movie in their room. There was a knock at the door and I opened it. There was a guy standing there holding a manilla envelope. I didn't think anything about it. I sometimes get stuff from the office and we get plenty of packages otherwise. I asked him what he had but he just handed me the envelope. It was slim and obviously held a DVD. I took it and was about to ask him where to sign for it but he just turned and walked away. That was strange, but....I took it back into my home office and ripped open the envelope. There was no writing, nothing at all to indicate what was inside. I stuck it in my player and turned the TV on. It was blank for a second and then...."

He stared at the hula dancer standing still between us. Then he reached down into a desk drawer and pulled out one of those portable DVD players. He plugged it in and said, "Lock the door."

I came back and sat down behind the desk next to him. He punched the play button and the eight inch screen lit up. Dave lay on a hotel bed while a slender dark hair woman with breasts like grapefruit bounced wildly as she drove herself down again and again onto his cock. Her thrusts were aided by a naked Gary Matthews ramming his dick into her ass as hard as he could while holding her hips.

"Oh God, yes, ram it in me harder. Damn it, harder. I won't break. Fuck me. Davey, Davey....you feel so good in there."

In the video Dave reached up to hold her by those luscious tits and leaned forward to grab one fat nipple for a second untill her rocking motion pulled it out. He grabbed it again and sucked frantically for another second.

She rested her weight on his chest and simply took Matthew's thrusts while she stayed close to Dave, letting him squeeze and milk those phenomenal tits. I understood what he meant about her breasts being too large for her body. She wasn't a big woman, but damn, they were impressive.

She pulled his lips off her breast and apparently tried to swallow his tongue.

"You love these titties, baby? You want to suck them all night?"

"Oh God, God...yes....yes..."

"Aren't you glad I came by your office today, Mr. Brandon?"

"You have to ask, Paula? You can't feel how glad I am to be here?"

"Would you rather be here or home with your wife?"

After a moment...

"You bastard, you're fucking me and you won't even tell me I'm hotter than your wife. Does she have tits like these? Is she as tight as me? You didn't fight too hard when I pulled your dick out and sucked it. Were you thinking about your wife then?"

She pushed herself down and must have done something to squeeze him where a guy likes to be squeezed because he moaned and said, "Oh shit, baby, on her best night, she was never like this."

She held a breast up and rubbed the nipple over his lips and wouldn't let him catch it.

"Are you going to be thinking about me tonight or whenever you're on top of her fat ass? Are you Mr. Brandon?"

"You know I will, dammit, I'll be thinking about you every night and trying to imagine it's you I'm inside."

He hit the pause button.

"There are two hours like that, and I said stuff....stuff about Darlene...I didn't realize what she was doing until I saw this video."

"She videotaped you?"

"Who else? I'm not working on anything that might have anything to do with this, and....they delivered it to my home, not to my office. She's sending a message. If I hadn't been there, if Darlene had somehow seen this first..."

He rubbed his eyes.

"It''s not just that she will divorce me if she ever sees this. I've never been unfaithful, ever, and I know she hasn't been...."

He looked up at me and I could see the embarrassment and pride in his eyes.

"I know you guys, most people, don't think she's hot but a lot of guys like heavier woman. Sounds strange, I know, but, the guy that does our pool walks around without a shirt whenever he's there in the summer. I came in one time and saw her slap him so hard it must have rattled his teeth. I didn't walk in and waited a couple of minutes. She told me about it that night. The bastard had come up behind her and started rubbing his dick all over her ass and playing with her tits. He's 22, and the mailman, I don't want to go there. He drops by the house for every single piece of mail or advertising junk....to hand deliver it. She humors him, but she told me she's told him a dozen times that she's happily married. He never pushes it too far so she'll complain, but I've seen him a few times. He's into her."

"We talked about it after the incident with the 22-year-old. I was proud of what she did, but I had to admit I'd worry about a 22-year-old with long hair and a flat stomach hitting on my wife. She took me into the bedroom, sucked me off and fucked me until I couldn't out of bed. She told me I was the only man who was ever going to get into her, ever!"

He raised his eyes to mine.

"That's the woman who is going to hear me tell another woman that I'll be thinking about her while I'm inside my wife. She's going to hear me say that sex with this woman is better than it ever has been with my wife. I feel like taking a spoon and scraping my eyes out."

"She was playing you, Dave. She knows that a guy will saying anything in the middle of a hot fuck. That was your dick talking, not you."

"Maybe, but it doesn't change the words. It doesn't change what I did. I've been trying to avoid Darlene ever since and I know she's going to get suspicious. But I feel like if I look into her eyes, I'm going to break down and confess and beg her to forgive me. I know she won't."

He took his head in his hands.

"What am I going to do, Bill? You've got to let him out. I have to hope and pray she'll destroy this, then all I have to do is figure out a way I can live with it. If you keep him in here, I know she'll send another copy, or put them on the internet, or put it where I can't block it and she'll tell Darlene where to look."

He looked up at me. I'd never seen such a look of raw desperation.

"I was wrong, I was stupid. Bill, please, please, let him walk. I'll never ask you for another favor again and I'll owe you my life. But...do this for me."

I just sat there and couldn't believe what Id heard.

"This doesn't make sense, Dave. This woman isn't a secret agent or a mob girl. She's just a fucking housewife. How does a housewife waltz in, seduce two experienced prosecutors, set up a secret taping, and plan on blackmailing the State Attorney's office into giving her what she wants? If she was a man, I'd say she had balls the size of cannonballs. There's got to be more to this."

"I've tried to call her since Saturday, but I haven't been able to reach her. I don't know what's going on. I mean, I do but I'm like you. How does a normal housewife pull this off, or even plan it? Why did she pick me instead of you, or Matthews or anybody else? How did she know I was the most married guy in this office, at least since you and Debbie split? This wouldn't have worked with anybody else, or not as well.

"Also, why the hell is she doing this? The guy tried to kill her, we both know that, yet she's doing all this to set him free? If I tried to write this up in a screenplay and sell it to Hollywood, nobody would believe it."

The phone rang. Dave obviously thought about blowing it off, but then picked it up.

"What is it, Sally? Who? Put her on. You bitch, what are you trying to do? Do you have any idea..."

He stopped in mid sentence and it was like he had been hit between the eyes with a board. He looked at the phone as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing, then handed it to me.

"Mr. Maitland, this is Paula Donnally. I believe you've already seen my little video and Dave has filled you in on what happened Friday. You're a smart man so I shouldn't have to fill in between the lines for you. Are you going to release my husband?"

Her voice was rough, a cross between the croak of a 50-year smoker and a woman who'd been strangled so hard her vocal cords were still stressed, but I understood her.

"I don't know, Mrs. Donnally. You crossed the line from being a loving, caring, guilty cheating wife to something else altogether. It doesn't feel like a wife coming to the rescue of her husband. It feels like...something else. I just don't know what."

"If I send a courier to stop Mrs. Brandon in the supermarket and give her a copy of an interesting DVD, you know your friend will be sleeping in a strange bed tonight, and his wife will divorce him within a few weeks. I know she loves him and she'll try to forgive him, but she'll listen to what he said when he was fucking me. In the end, she won't be able to forgive him. Are you willing to destroy your friend's marriage, his life, just to keep Paul behind bars a few days longer, because that's all it will be. No matter what you do, Paul will walk out a free man in just a little while, so when Dave's marriage is over, it won't do any good for you to change your mind."

"I need a number I can call you at. Dave said he'd tried to reach you for three days without any luck. I need to talk to your husband and think about things for a little while. Then I'll call you - it'll be today."

"He couldn't reach me because I didn't want to talk to him. You call the shots there. I wanted to wait for you so, yeah, here's my cell. Call me, but don't wait too long."

I wrote the number down and she clicked off.

"She knew I was in here and she knew I had seen the video. She also knew enough not to go after me, because I can't be blackmailed any more like this. What the hell have you stepped in, Dave?"

He couldn't answer me because neither one of us had any idea of what was really going on, but I was going to find out.

Buzz Holloway was the lieutenant on duty and he met me at the entrance to the jail, then led me through the maze back to the single cell where Paul Donnally was lying on his bunk. Tucker must have bought out a used book store. There were at least 30 paperbacks scattered around his cell. He looked up as I walked in.

"Maitland?"

"Hello, Paul, how are you doing?"

He put down the tattered paperback he had been reading. It was 'Horseman, Ride By." This was getting downright spooky. Six Degrees of Separation horseshit. There were too many connections. I decided to ignore it.

"Alright, I guess. I haven't taken a week off work without Paula in 20 years. We've always been together so, it's been a little strange. On the other hand, I haven't had to stare into her lying slut eyes for a week, so that's the good part. Even the food isn't too bad. Thank you for letting Gil come in to talk to me."

"He's a good friend?"

"Better than I deserve."

"I know the feeling. Look, Paul, we need to talk. I need YOU to talk to ME. To be honest, I get the feeling there are a lot of secrets that you're holding back."

"Everybody has secrets."

"Can you stop for just a minute with that fucking Zen crap? Things are happening - things involving your wife and you - things that are screwing up other people's lives. Things that are hurting people who don't deserve to be hurt because you and your wife royally screwed up your lives. Can you just for a few minutes talk to me like another human being?"

"What are you talking about?"

He rolled to his feet but didn't get off the cot.

I looked at Holloway and then glanced around the cell and walkway. There were recording devices and I wasn't sure he could, even if he wanted to, turn them off.

"I need to speak to him privately. Can you get us someplace where we can talk, without a recording?"

He thought about it for a moment.

Ten minutes later he and another guard had Donnally cuffed behind his back with the cuffs attached to leg manacles. They walked beside us as he shuffled along the walkway to a back elevator and then up to a third floor. They led us to a room with two doors, a microwave, a refrigerator, a table, two chairs and a couch that looked like it folded out.

"This is the staff room," Holloway said. "Sometimes when things get really hectic, people will sack out or get a nap here. It's even been known as a place where persons of the opposite sex can....meet."

"Say no more. So this has NO taping."

"None."

"I'll rap on the door when we're through. Okay?"

When they had left and Donnally was sitting back uncomfortably on the couch, I sat beside him.

"A friend of mine is facing the end of his marriage. He's going to lose his wife and his kids unless I agree to drop the charges against you and let you walk. But, I've seen what you can do. I don't know what the hell you are, but I know you could be deadly, and you've already come within a whisper of killing your wife - strangling her with your bare hands.

"So, if I don't let you go, I'm going to be responsible for the destruction of a friend's life. If I let you go, I'm afraid you're going to go apeshit on me and kill your wife. Then, I think, you're going to kill yourself and you will leave two orphans behind. I'll have to go through the rest of my life seeing the photos of your wife with her eyes popped out and her face blood red from all the ruptured capillaries. I've seen photos of people who've been strangled - it's not pretty. I'll dream about her, and you. I've been able to live with my dreams and I've seen some ugly things but, I don't want to live with these new dreams. Please talk to me."

"You said I've got a lot of secrets. You're right. You have no idea, Maitland."

"Tell me a secret."

"My grandfather died in an insane asylum, a facility for the criminally insane."

I didn't say anything.

"It's not...I don't believe in that crap about an insanity gene. He had problems with what we'd call anger issues today. He beat two men to death outside a bar one night up in Massachusetts. It was....he had what I've got. It's nothing supernatural. They -- the doctors at the facility where I spent some time - called it enhanced tendon strength. A doctor that did some research said that there's some belief among researchers that it played a part in the legend of the Viking Berzerkers. Rage was one part, but having the strength to rip people apart was another big element. Tendon strength, like anything else, follows a Bell curve. You have people with very weak tendon strength at the bottom, then people like me at the top of the curve. If you have it, you can do some pretty incredible things, but it's natural, just rare, the doctors tell me."

"You must wow them at parties. How come Gil didn't know anything about it? Also your wife didn't know better than to piss off a guy with that kind of strength?"

He leaned forward and and rested his chin on his linked hands, staring down at the floor.

"When I was young, a teenager, I did something, something very bad."

He was silent for so long I thought he had turned off. Gone back into some world only he could enter.

"I was in therapy for a long time. I'd inherited my grandfather's tendon strength and his anger. They taught me how to control it, and I did. I pushed it down. I pushed it so far back, back inside me, that it seemed like it went away, except that it never did, of course. It was there, waiting.

"It was there when I met Paula in college. God, I loved her. I kept everything inside, good and bad. She.....she was like a wildfire. Everything was more real, more colorful, more alive, when I was with her."

He looked up at me.

"You were in love, so you know what it was like except, you weren't crazy, you didn't have to hide what you were. I couldn't....I couldn't let her.....know what I was....see what I was. She wouldn't have loved me, no one could.

"Somehow - somehow she fell in love with who, or what, she thought I was. We married, had children and made a life. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way - Gil told me - some man, a big Hispanic guy, came along and found what she really wanted. He took her away from me without me even knowing."

He took deep breaths, as if trying to calm himself and the hair on the back of my neck rose, as if I were a kid again facing that big, mean dog by myself.

"So I lived with a woman who didn't love me anymore; I didn't know who she was and she didn't know who I was. Kind of funny, actually, until - I found out. Then, all I wanted was to get away from her. It was the damnedest thing; she didn't love me, she couldn't love me, but she wouldn't fucking leave me alone - she wouldn't leave me alone!

"She finally cornered me in our house and it came out - I had my hands around her neck before I knew it. It would have been so easy but, we were standing in front of pictures of our children. She was clawing at my hands, my face, but it was like she wasn't there. They were there. They were looking at me. I couldn't do it.

"That's the story, Mr. Maitland. That's who I am, what I am and why I can't see Paula again, because I'll kill her the next time, I know it. You can't let me out."

October 10, 2005 -- MONDAY - 2 p.m.

"Mrs. Donnally?"

"Mr. Maitland. Did you have a chance to talk to my husband? And what's your decision?"

"I did, but I'd like to talk to you before I make that decision."

"What is so difficult about what I'm asking? Paul is about as harmless as any human being that ever walked the earth, except for what happened with me, and I provoked that. I'll handle it differently next time. As to those stories about the jail, I know my husband, or I thought I did. Even knowing what I know now, he didn't do what they're saying. He could just as easily have sprouted wings and flown. I know him, better than anyone else on earth. I'll never believe what you're saying about him."

"No, you don't, Mrs. Donnally. You think you do know him, but you don't. I think you're in for some big surprises down the road, but, why don't you come up to my office and we'll talk. Maybe we can work out some kind of compromise."