Night Train (5 page)

       'And a man came out?'

       What did he look like, sweetheart?

       'Poor.'

       Poor? Honey, what do you mean? Like shabby?

       'He had patches on his clothes.'

       It took me a second. He had patches on his 'elbows'. Poor. That's right: Don't they say the darnedest things?

       Sweetheart. How'd he seem?

       'He looked mad. I wanted to ask him to help me but I didn't.'

       And soon I'm saying, 'Thanks, honey. Thanks, ma'am.'

       When I badge my way from door to door like this, and the women see me coming up the path—I don't know what they think. There I am in my parka, my black jeans. They think I'm a diesel. Or a truck driver from the Soviet Union. But the men know at once what I am. Because I give them the eyeball—absolutely direct. As a patrol cop, on the street, that's the first thing you have to train yourself to do: Stare at men. In the eyes. And then when I was plainclothes, and undercover, I had to train myself out of it, all over again. Because no other kind of woman on earth, not a movie star, not a brain surgeon, not a head of state, will stare at a man the way a police stares.

       Back home I field the usual ten messages from Colonel Tom. He veers around, racking his brains for shit on Trader. A prior record of instability and temper-loss that amounts to a few family disagreements and a scuffle in a bar five years ago. Examples of impatience, of less than perfect gallantry, around Jennifer. Times he let her walk by a puddle without dunking his coat in it.

       Colonel Tom is losing the story line. I wish he could hear how he sounds. Some of his beefs are so smallprint, they make me think of diss murders. Diss murders: When someone gets blown in half for a breach of form that would have slipped by Emily Post.

       'What's the game plan, Mike?'

       I told him. Jesus... Anyway, he seemed broadly satisfied.

       If the jury is still out on women police, then the jury is still out on Tobe. Still out, after all these months, and still hollering for transcripts of the judge's opening address.

       Right now the guy is next door watching a 'taped' quiz show where the contestants have been instructed beforehand to jump up and down and scream and whoop and french each other every time they get an answer right. The multiple-choice questions do not deal in matters of fact. They deal in hearsay. The contestants respond, not with what they think, but with what they think everybody else thinks.

       I just went through and sat on the great couch of Tobe's lap for five minutes and watched them doing it. Grown adults acting like five-year-olds at a birthday party, with this routine: What do Americans think is America's favorite breakfast? Cereal. 'Boing'. Only 23 percent. Coffee and toast? Wheel All 'right'.

       What do Americans think is America's choice suicide method. Sleeping pills. Yeah! Ow!

       Where do Americans think France is? In Canada. 'Get' down!

March 11

There's an obit in this morning's Sunday 'Times'. In its blandness and brevity you can feel the exertion of all Tom Rockwell's heft.

       Just a resume, plus manner of death ('as yet undetermined'). And a photograph. This must have been taken, what, about five years ago? She is smiling with childish lack of restraint. Like you'd just told her something wonderful. If you skimmed over this photograph—the smile, the delighted eyes, the short hair emphasizing the long neck, the clean jaw—you'd think that here was someone who was about to get married kind of early. Not someone who had suddenly died.

       Dr. Jennifer Rockwell. And her dates.

       The little girl on Whitman, with her pink ribbons and bobby socks? She didn't 'hear' anything, on March fourth. Today, however, I went to see someone who did.

       Mrs. Rolfe, the old dame on the top floor. It's half after five and she's half in the bag. So I don't expect much. And I don't get much. It's sweet sherry she's drinking: The biggest bang for the buck. Mr. Rolfe died many years ago and she's quietly splashing her way through a widowhood that's lasting longer than her marriage.

       I ask about the shots. She says she was dozing (yeah, right), and the TV was on, and there were shots on the TV also. Some cop thing, naturally. She describes the report she heard for definite as unmistakably a gunshot, but no louder than a door being slammed two or three rooms away. You can feel the weight of the building: Constructed in an age of cheap materials. Mrs. Rolfe dialed 911 at 19:40. First officer showed at 19:55. Plenty of time, theoretically, for Trader to pack up and split. The little girl wheeled her bike in 'around a quarter of eight,' according to her mother. Which puts Trader on the street—when? 19:30? 19:41?

       'They fight ever?'

       'Not to my knowledge, no,' says Mrs. Rolfe.

       'How'd they seem to you?'

       'Like the dream couple.'

       But what kind of dream?

       'It's just so awful,' she says, making a move for the sauce. 'It's shaken me up, I admit.'

       I used to be like that. Any bad news would do. Like your friend's friend's dog died.

       'Mrs. Rolfe, did Jennifer seem depressed ever?'

       'Jennifer? She was always cheerful. Always cheerful.'

       Trader, Jennifer, Mrs. Rolfe: They were neighborly. Jennifer ran errands for her. If she needed something heavy shifted, Trader would move it. They kept a spare key for her. She kept a spare key for them. She still had that spare key, used to gain access on the night of March fourth. I say I'll take that key, thank you, ma'am, and log it with Evidence Control. Left her my card, in case she needed anything. I could see myself looking in on her here, as I still do for several elderly parties in the Southern. I could see myself developing an obligation.

       On the floor below: The door to Jennifer's apartment is sashed with orange crime-scene tape. I slipped inside for a second. My first reaction, in the bedroom, was strictly police. I thought: What a beautiful crime scene. Totally undeteriorated. Not only the blood spatter on the wall but the sheets on the bed have the exact same pattern that I remember.

       I sat on the chair with my.38 on my lap, trying to imagine. But I kept thinking about Jennifer the way she used to be. As gifted as she was, in body and mind, she never glassed herself off from you. If you ran into her, at a party, say, or downtown, she wouldn't say hi and move on. She'd always be particular with you. She'd always leave you with something.

       Jennifer would always leave you with something.

March 12

Today my shift was noon to eight. Sitting there smoking cigarettes and changing tapes, changing tapes—audio, visual, audiovisual. We're casing the new hotel in Quantro, because we know the Outfit has money in it. I finally got the visual fix I was looking for: Two guys in the atrium, standing in the shadows back of the fountain. When we say the Outfit or the Mob, in this city, we don't mean the Colombians or the Cubans, the Yakuza, the Jake posses, the El Ruks, the Crips and the Bloods. We mean Italians. So I watched these two greasers in blue suits that cost five grand, gesturing at each other, very formal. Men of honor, worthy of respect. Wise guys had long before stopped behaving that way, but then some movies came along that reminded them that their grandparents used to do that shit, with the honor, and so they started doing it, all over again.

       Incidentally: We want that hotel.

       I feel grateful for quiet workloads on days such as this, days of lethargy and faint but persistent nausea which have to do with my time of life, and my liver. More my liver than my unused womb. My only way around this is a transplant, a full organ transplant, which is possible, and expensive. But the precarious-ness—the risk of hepatic collapse—keeps me honest. If I bought a new liver, I'd just trash that one too.

       Early afternoon Colonel Tom buzzed me and asked if I'd come up to his office on the twenty-third.

       He is shrinking. His desk is big anyway but now it looks like an aircraft carrier. And his face like a little gun turret, with its two red panic buttons. He isn't getting better.

       I told him the move I planned for Trader.

       You'll go in hard, he said. Like I know you can.

       Like you know I can, Colonel Tom.

       Freestyle, Mike, he said. Flake him. I don't care if he spills and walks. I just want to hear him say it.

       To hear him say it, Colonel Tom?

       I just want to hear him say it.

       With Silvera or Overmars, you could always tell when a case was beating them down: They started shaving every other day. That, plus the usual symptoms of being wide awake for a month. Pretty soon they're like the guys gathered around the braziers in the stockyards sidings—ghosts of a Depression section gang, lit by the flares... Colonel Tom's cheeks were smooth. His cheeks were smooth. But he couldn't take a razor to the brown smears of pain beneath his eyes which were deepening and hardening like scabs.

       'Don't buy all that Ivy League, Skull and Bones bullshit. The soft voice. The logic. Like even 'he' thinks he's too good to be true. There's evil in him, Mike. He...'

       Falling silent. His head vibrated, his head actually trembled to terrible imaginings. Imaginings he wanted and needed to be true. Because any outcome, yes, any at all, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, marathon tortures of Chinese ingenuity, of Afghan lavishness, any outcome was better than the other thing. Which was his daughter putting the.22 in her mouth and pulling the trigger three times.

       Colonel Tom was now going to lay something on me. I could feel it coming. He roused himself. Briskly but also ditheringly, he leafed through a binder: Looked like a lab report out of the ME's office. I wondered how Colonel Tom was monitoring and controlling the post-mortem findings as they came in piece by piece.

       'Jennifer tested positive for ejaculate, vaginal and oral,' he said—and it was costing him to go on looking my way. 'Oral, Mike. You see what I'm saying?'

       I nodded. And of course I was thinking, Jesus, this really 'is' fucked up.

       Eight days on and Jennifer Rockwell is still laid out like a banquet dish in the walk-in freezer on Battery and Jeff.

March 13

Time for Trader.

       My first thought was this: I'd send Oltan O'Boye and maybe Keith Booker up to Trader's department at CSU, in a black-and-white, and have them jerk him out of a seminar. Yeah, with lights but no sirens. Have them yank him out of the lecture hall or wherever, and bring him downtown. The hitch was we'd be up against probable cause way too early. And whatever Colonel Tom thought we had, we didn't have probable cause.

       So I just called his room on campus. At six a.m.

       'Professor Faulkner? Detective Hoolihan. Homicide. I want you downtown today at Criminal Investigations. As soon as you humanly can.'

       He said what for?

       'I'll send the wagon. You like me to send the wagon?'

       He said what for?

       And I just said I wanted to straighten something out.

       In truth it's perfect for me.

       Around eight in the morning, and we're three hours into a blizzard that has upped and hurled itself down from Alaska. You got hail, sleet, snow, and spume skimmed off from the ocean, plus face-slapping gouts of iced rain. Trader will be trudging along from the subway stop or clambering out of a cab down there on Whitney. He'll look up, for shelter, at the Lubianka of CID. Where he will find a succession of drenched and dirty linoleum corridors, a slow-climbing, heavy-breathing elevator, and, in Homicide, a forty-four-year-old police with coarse blonde hair, bruiser's tits and broad shoulders, and pale blue eyes in her head that have seen everything.

       And Trader will find hardly anybody else. It's Tuesday. In Homicide the zoo contains only a smattering of witnesses, suspects, malefactors and perpetrators. The 'weekend', which for us is just a code word meaning a regular bender of citywide crime, has come and gone. And there is also the bad weather: Bad weather is the big police. For company, while he waits in the zoo, Trader will have only the husband, the father and the pimp of a bludgeoned prostitute, and a Machine executioner (presently top of the money list) called Jackie Zee who has been asked downtown to elaborate on an alibi.

       The phones are silent. The midnight shift is falling apart and the eight-to-four is limping in. Johnny Mac is reading an editorial in 'Penthouse'. Keith Booker, big black motherfucker with scars and whole gold ingots on most of his teeth, is trying to watch a college ballgame from Florida on the faulty TV. O'Boye is painfully bent over his typewriter. These guys are kind of in on it. Only Silvera has the full picture, but these guys are kind of in on it. Trader Faulkner will be receiving no words of condolence from anybody here.

       At 08:20 the Associate Professor checks in downstairs and is shunted up to the fourteenth. I watch him step out. In his right hand he is holding his briefcase, in his left the pink card issued him by building security at the front desk. The rim of his fedora, which has lost its definition in the rain, is starting to droop over his darkened face, and his overcoat gives off a faint vapor under the tube lighting. His gait is deliberate and kind of wide at the knees. His inturned shoes are squelching toward me.

       He says, 'It's Mike, isn't it. Good to see you again.'

       And I say, 'You're late.'

       Johnny Mac gives him a leer, and Detective Booker does a good job of chewing gum in his direction, as Trader is led into the zoo. I point to a chair. And walk away. If he likes, Trader can talk philosophy with Jackie Zee. A half-hour later I return. In response to a wag of my head Trader gets to his feet and I re-escort him back past the elevators.

       At this point, as arranged, Silvera strolls out of the door marked Sex Crimes and says hey Mike, what we got?