Night Train Read online

  I rapped on the half-glass back door.

  Colonel Tom turned: Pleased to see me. Not even a little frown of inconvenience, like maybe I was going to take the shine off his evening. But the instant he opened the door I could feel my face collapsing. And I knew what he thought. He thought I was back on it. I mean the booze and all.

  “Mike. Jesus, Mike, are you okay?”

  I said, “Colonel Tom? Miriam?” But Miriam was already falling away and fading from my sight. Falling away at thirty-two feet per second squared. “You lost your daughter on this day. You lost your Jennifer.”

  He looked like he was still trying to smile his way past it. The smile now starting to plead. They had David one year, Yehoshua the next. And then, a decade and a half later: Jennifer.

  “Yes she’s gone,” I said. “By her own hand.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “Colonel Tom, you know I love you and I’d never lie to you. But it seems your baby girl took her own life, sir. Yes she did. Yes she did.”

  They fetched their coats and we drove downtown. Miriam stayed in the car with Johnny Mac. Colonel Tom made the ID leaning on a freezer door in the ME’s office on Battery and Jeff.

  Oltan O’Boye would be riding east, to campus. Taking the news to Trader Faulkner.

  March 5

  I woke up this morning and Jennifer was standing at the end of my bed. She was waiting for my eyes to open. I looked, and she was gone.

  The ghost of a dead person must divide into many ghosts—to begin with. It is labor-intensive—to begin with. Because there are many bedrooms to visit, many sleepers to stand over.

  Some sleepers—maybe just two or three—the dead will never leave.

  March 6

  Tuesdays I’m working the midnights. So Tuesdays I generally put in an afternoon at the Leadbetter. Attired in a taupe pants suit, I sit in my own office eighteen floors above where Wilmot deadends into Grainge. I am part-time security consultant here and I will go half-time or better when my EoD finally gets to be the mandatory twenty-five behind me. That date—my Entrance on Duty—is September 7, 1974. Retirement is already sniffing me up to see if I’m ripe.

  The front desk called to say I had a visitor: Colonel Rockwell. Frankly, I was surprised that he was up and around. My understanding was that the boys were down from Chicago and the phone was off the hook. The Rockwells were digging in.

  I put aside the CSSS layout I’d been staring at and I did my face. Too, I buzzed Linda, asking her to greet the elevator and bring the Colonel right on in.

  He entered.

  “Hey, Colonel Tom.”

  I stepped forward but he seemed to take a pass on the hug I was offering him and he kept his chin down as we slid off his coat. The head staying low when he sat in the leather chair. I went back of my desk and said, “How goes it with you, Colonel Tom? My dear.”

  He shrugged. He exhaled slowly. He looked up.

  And I saw what you seldom see in the grief-struck. Panic. A primitive panic, a low-IQ panic, in the eyes—it makes you consider the meaning of the word harebrained. And it made me panic. I thought: He’s in a nightmare and now I am too. What do I do if he starts screaming? Start screaming? Should everybody start screaming?

  “How is Miriam?”

  “Very quiet,” he said, after a while.

  I waited. “Take your time, Colonel,” I said. I thought it might be a good idea to do something null and soothing, like maybe get to some bills. “Say as much as you want or as little as you want.”

  Tom Rockwell was Squad Supervisor during much of my time in Homicide. That was before he climbed into his personal express elevator and pushed the button marked Penthouse. In the space of ten years he made lieutenant as Shift Commander, then captain in charge of Crimes Against Persons, then full colonel as head of CID. He’s brass now: He isn’t a police, he’s a politician, juggling stats and budgets and PR. He could make Dep Comm for Operations. Christ, he could make Mayor. “It’s all head-doctoring and kissing ass,” he once said to me. “You know what I am? I’m not a cop. I’m a communicator.” But now Colonel Tom, the communicator, just sat there, very quietly.

  “Mike. There’s something went on here.”

  Again I waited.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “I feel that too,” I said.

  The diplomatic response—but his eyes leveled in.

  “What’s your read on it, Mike? Not as a friend. As a police.”

  “As a police? As a police I have to say that it looks like a suicide, Colonel Tom. But it could have been an accident. There was the rag there, and the 303. You think maybe she was cleaning it and...”

  He flinched. And of course I understood. Yeah. What was she doing with the .22 in her mouth? Maybe tasting it. Tasting death. And then she—

  “It’s Trader,” he said. “It has to be Trader.”

  Well, this demanded some time to settle. Okay. Now: It is sometimes true that an apparent suicide will, on inspection, come back a homicide. But that inspection takes about two seconds. It is ten o’clock on a Saturday night, in Destry or Oxville. Some jig has just blown his chick to bits with a shotgun. But a couple of spikes later he hatches a brilliant scheme: He’ll make it look like she did it. So he gives the weapon a wipe and props her up on the bed or wherever. He might even muster the initiative to scrawl out a note, in his own fair hand. We used to have one of these notes tacked to the squadroom noticeboard. It read: “Good By Crule Whirld.” Well this is some sad shit, Marvis, you say when you get there, responding to Marvis’s call. What happened? And Marvis says, She was depress. Discreetly, Marvis leaves the room. He’s done his bit. What more can a man do? Now it’s our turn. You glance at the corpse: There’s no burn or shell wadding in the wound and the blood spatter is on the wrong pillow. And the wrong wall. You follow Marvis into the kitchen and he’s standing there with a glassine bag in one hand and a hot spoon in the other. Homicide. Heroin. Nice, Marvis. Come on. Downtown. Because you’re a murdering piece of shit. And a degenerate motherfucker. That’s why. A homicide come dressed to the ball as a suicide: This you expect from a braindead jackboy in the Seventy-Seven. But from Trader Faulkner, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at CSU? Please. The smart murder just never happens. That’s all bullshit. That’s all so...pathetic. The Professor did it. Oh, sure. Murder is dumb and then even dumber. Only two things will make you any good at it: Luck and practice. If you’re dealing with the reasonably young and healthy, and if the means is violent, then the homicide/suicide gray area is TV, is bullshit, is ketchup. Make no mistake, we would see it if it was there—because we want suicides to be homicides. We would infinitely prefer it. A made homicide means overtime, a clearance stat, and high fives in the squad-room. And a suicide is no damn use to anyone.

  This isn’t me, I thought. This isn’t me, sitting here. I’m not around.

  “Trader?”

  “Trader. He was there, Mike. He was the last to see. I’m not saying he... But it’s Trader. Trader owns her. It’s Trader.”

  “Why?”

  “Who else?”

  I sat back, away from this. But then he went on, saying in his tethered voice,

  “Correct me if I’m wrong. Did you ever meet anybody happier than Jennifer? Did you ever hear about anybody happier than Jennifer? More stable? She was, she was sunny.”

  “No you’re not wrong, Colonel Tom. But the minute you really go into someone. You and I both know that there’s always enough pain.”

  “There wasn’t any—”

  Here his voice gave a kind of hiccup of fright. And I thought he must be imagining her last moments. It took him a few swallows, and then he continued:

  “Pain. Why was she naked, Mike? Jennifer. Miss Modest. Who never even owned a bikini. With her figure.”

  “Excuse me, sir, is the case being worked? Is Silvera on it? What?”

  “I stetted it, Mike. It’s pending. Because I’m going to ask you to do something for me.”

&nb
sp; TV, etcetera, has had a terrible effect on perpetrators. It has given them style. And TV has ruined American juries for ever. And American lawyers. But TV has also fucked up us police. No profession has been so massively fictionalized. I had a bunch of great lines ready. Like: I was quit when you came in here. I’m twice as quit now. But this was Colonel Tom I was talking to. So I spoke the plain truth.

  “You saved my life. I’d do anything for you. You know that.”

  He reached down for his briefcase. From it he removed a folder. Jennifer Rockwell. H97143. He held it out toward me, saying, “Bring me something I can live with. Because I can’t live with this.”

  Now he let me look at him. The panic had left his eyes. As for what remained, well, I’ve seen it a thousand times. The skin is matte, containing not a watt of light. The stare goes nowhere into the world. It cannot penetrate. Seated on the other side of the desk, I was already way out of range.

  “It’s a little fucked up, ain’t it, Colonel Tom?”

  “Yeah, it’s a little fucked up. But it’s the way we’re going to do this.”

  I leaned back and said experimentally, “I keep trying to think it through. You’re sitting there kind of idling around with it—with the weapon. Cleaning it. Toying with it. Then a perverse thought. An infantile thought.” I mean, that’s how an intelligent infant finds out about something: It puts it in its mouth. “You put it in your mouth. You—”

  “It wasn’t an accident, Mike,” he said, standing. “That’s precluded by the evidence. Expect a package this time tomorrow.”

  He nodded at me. This package, his nod seemed to say, was going to straighten me out.

  “What is it, Colonel Tom?”

  “Something for your VCR.”

  And I thought, Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me. The young lovers in their designer dungeon. I could just see it. The young lovers, in their customized correctional facility—Trader in his Batman suit, and Jennifer shackled to her rack, wearing nothing but feathers and tar.

  But Colonel Tom soon put my mind at rest.

  “It’s the autopsy,” he said.

  March 7

  What with AA, golf, the Discuss Group on Mondays, and the night class on Thursdays at Pete (together with countless and endless correspondence courses), plus the Tuesday nightshift, and Saturdays, when I tend to hang with my bunkies in the Forty-Four—what with all this, my boyfriend says I don’t have time for a boyfriend and maybe my boyfriend is right. But I do have a boyfriend: Tobe. He’s a dear guy and I value him and I need him. One thing about Tobe—he sure knows how to make a woman feel slim. Tobe’s totally enormous. He fills the room. When he comes in late, he’s worse than the night train: Every beam in the building wakes up and moans. I find love difficult. Love finds me difficult. I learned that with Deniss, the hard way. And Deniss learned it too. It’s this simple: Love destabilizes me, and I can’t afford to be destabilized. So Tobe here suits me right down to the ground. His strategy, I suspect, is to stick around and grow on me. And it’s working. But so slowly that I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see if it all panned out.

  Tobe is no choirboy, obviously: He rooms with Detective Mike Hoolihan. But when I told him what was going to be on TV that night he took himself off to Fretnick’s for a couple of cold ones. We keep booze in the apartment and somehow I like to know it’s there even though it will kill me if I touch it. I cooked him an early dinner. And around seven he finished mopping up his pork chop and sloped out the door.

  Right now I want to say something about myself and Colonel Tom. One morning toward the very end of my career in Homicide I came in for the eight to four—late, drunk, with a face made of orange sand, and carrying my liver on my hip like a flight bag. Colonel Tom got me into his office and said, Mike, you can kill yourself if that’s what you want. But don’t expect me to watch you doing it. He took me by the arm and led me to the second tier of the headquarters garage. He drove me straight to Lex General. The admissions doc looked me over and the first thing he said was, You live alone, right? And I said, Mo. No, I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss...After they dried me out I convalesced at the Rockwells’ residence—this was when they lived way out in Whitefield. For a week I lay in a little bedroom at the back of the ground floor. The distant traffic was music and people who weren’t people—as well as people who were—came and stood at the foot of my bed. Uncle Tom, Miriam, the family physician. And then the others. And Jennifer Rockwell, who was nineteen years old, would come and read to me in the evenings. I lay there trying to listen to her clear young voice, wondering if Jennifer was real or just another of the ghosts who occasionally stopped by, cool, self-sufficient, unreproachful figures, their faces carved and blue.

  I never felt judged by her. She had her troubles too, back then. And she was the daughter of a police. She didn’t judge.

  -+=*=+-

  First I recheck the case folder, where you’re going to find every last bit of boring shit, like the odometer reading on the unmarked that Johnny Mac and myself drove that night—the night of March fourth. But I want all the chapter and verse. I want to shore up a sequence in my mind.

  19:30. Trader Faulkner is the last to see. Trader has stated that he took his leave of her at that time, as he always did on a Sunday night. Jennifer’s apparent mood is described here as “cheerful” and “normal.”

  19:40. The old lady in the attic apartment, dozing in front of her TV, is woken by a shot. She calls 911.

  19:55. Beat cop shows. The old lady, Mrs. Rolfe, keeps a set of spare keys to Jennifer’s apartment. Beat cop gains access and finds body.

  20:05. Tony Silvera takes the call in the squad-room. The dispatcher gives the name of the victim.

  20:15. I am summoned by Detective Sergeant John Macatitch.

  20:55. Jennifer Rockwell is pronounced.

  And twelve hours later she is cut.

  taceant colloquia, it says on the wall. effugiat risus.

  HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.

  Let talking cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.

  Die suspiciously, die violently, die unusually—in fact, die pretty much anywhere outside an intensive-care unit or a hospice—and you will be cut. Die unattended, and you will be cut. If you die in this American city, the paramedics will bring you down to the ME’s office on Battery and Jefferson. When it’s time to get around to you there, you will be trolleyed out of the walk-in freezer, weighed, and rolled onto a zinc gurney under an overhead camera. It used to be a microphone, and you’d take Polaroids. Now it’s a camera. Now it’s TV. At this stage your clothes will be examined, removed, bagged, and sent to Evidence Control. But Jennifer is wearing nothing but a toe-tag. And it begins.

  Maybe I’d better point out that the process itself, for me, means close to nothing. When I worked homicides, the autopsy room was part of my daily routine. And I still get down there on business at least once a week. Asset Forfeiture, which is a subdivision of Organized Crime, is a lot more hands-on than it sounds. Basically what we do is: We rip off the Mob. One whisper of conspiracy, out there by the pool, and we confiscate the entire marina. So we deal with bodies. Bodies found, almost always, in the trunks of airport rental cars. Impeccably executed and full of bullets. You’re down in the ME’s office half the morning sometimes, on account of all the bullets they have to track...The process itself doesn’t mean much to me. But Jennifer does. I am confidently assuming that Colonel Tom didn’t watch this, and would have relied on Silvera’s summary. Why am I watching it? Take away the bodies, and the autopsy room is like the kitchen of a restaurant that has yet to open. I am watching. I am sitting on the couch, smoking, taking notes, and using the Pause. I am bearing witness.

  Silvera is there: I can hear him briefing the pathologist. Jennifer is there, wearing her toe-tag. That body. The scene photographs in the case folder, with the moist eyes and mouth, could almost be considered pornographic (arty and “tasteful”—kind of ecce fem
ina), but there’s nothing erotic about her now, stiff like out of the deepfreeze, and flat on a slab between striplights and tiles. And all the wrong colors. The chemistry of death is busy with her, changing her from alkaline to acid. This is the body... Wait. That sounds like Paul No. Yes, the cutter is Paulie No. I guess you can’t blame a guy for loving his job, or for being Indonesian, but I have to say that that little slope gives me the creeps. This is the body, he is saying, echoing the sacrament: Hoc es corpus.

  “This is the body of a well-developed, well-nourished white female, measuring five feet ten inches in height and weighing approximately one hundred and forty pounds. She is wearing nothing.”

  First the external examination. Directed by Silvera, No takes a preliminary look at the wound. He shines a light into the mouth, which is rigored half open, and rolls her on to her side to see the exit. Then he scans the entire epidermis for abnormalities, marks, signs of struggle. Particularly the hands, the fingertips. No takes nail clippings, and performs the chemical tests for barium, antimony and lead deposits—to establish that she fired the .22. I recall that it was Colonel Tom who bought her that gun, years back, and taught her how to use it.

  Brisk as ever, Paulie No takes oral, vaginal and anal swabs. Too, he inspects the perineal area for tearing or trauma. And again I’m thinking of Colonel Tom. Because this is the only way that his read works. I mean, for Trader to be involved, it has to be a sex deal, right? Has to be. And it feels all wrong. Some funny things can happen on the cutter’s table. A double suicide can come back a homicide-suicide. A rape-murder can come back a suicide. But can a suicide come back a rape-murder?

  Autopsy is rape too, and here it comes. In the moment that the first incision is made, Jennifer becomes all body, or body only. Paul No is going in now. Goodbye. The elevation makes him look like a school child, glossy head dipped, and the scalpel poised like a pen as he makes the three cuts in the shape of a Y, one from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, and then on down through the pelvis. Up come the flaps—it makes me think of a carpet being lifted after damage by flood or fire—and No goes through the ribs with the electric saw. The breastplate comes out like a manhole lid and then the organ tree is removed entire (the organ tree, with its strange fruit) and placed in the steel sink to the side. No vivisects heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and takes tissue samples for analysis. Now he’s shaving the head, working in toward the exit wound.