Night Train Read online

  Again Trader bares his teeth. Again the look of difficulty, of impediment. But now he gives a sudden nod and says,

  Begin. Begin.

  This sheet is headed Explanation of Rights. Read and sign and initial each section. There. And there. Good. Okay. Sunday. March fourth.

  Trader lights another cigarette. By now the small interrogation room is split-level with smoke. He leans forward and begins to speak, not dreamily or wistfully but matter-of-fact, his arms folded, his eyes dipped.

  Sunday. It was Sunday. We did what we always do on Sunday. We slept late. I got up around ten-thirty and made breakfast. Scrambled eggs. We read the Times. You know how it is, Detective. Bathrobes. Her with the Arts, me with the Sports. We did an hour’s work. We went out just before two. We walked around. We had a beef sandwich at Maurie’s. We walked around. Around Rodham Park. It was a beautiful day. Cold and bright. We played tennis, indoors, at the Brogan. Jennifer won, as always. The score was 3-6, 6-7. We got back around five-thirty. She made lasagne. I packed a bag—

  You’re damn right you packed a bag.

  I don’t understand you. We always spent Sunday nights apart. It was Sunday. I packed a bag.

  You’re damn right you packed a bag.

  Because this was no ordinary Sunday, was it, Trader. Had you felt it coming? For how long? You were losing her, weren’t you, Trader. She wanted out from under you, Trader, and you could feel it. Maybe she was already seeing somebody else. Maybe not. But it was over. Oh, come on, man. It’s everyday. You know how it is, Professor. There are popular songs about it. Get on the bus, Gus. Drop off the key, Lee. But you weren’t going to let that happen, were you, Trader. And I understand. I understand.

  Untrue. Not the case. False.

  You said her mood that day was what?

  Normal. Cheerful. Typically cheerful.

  Yeah, right. So after a typically cheerful day with her typically cheerful boyfriend, she waits until he leaves the house and puts two bullets in her head.

  Two bullets?

  That surprises you?

  Yes. Doesn’t it surprise you, Detective?

  In the past, I have come into this interrogation room with damper ammo than I had on me now, and duly secured a confession. But not often. Men accused of wholesale slaughter, and not for the first time, proven killers with rapsheets as long as toilet rolls: Such men I have coated in sweat with nothing more than a single Caucasoid hair strand or half a Reebok footprint. It’s simple. You do them with science. But science was what Trader was a philosopher of. I am going to go in hard now. No quarter.

  Trader, at what point did you and the decedent have sex?

  What?

  The decedent tested positive for ejaculate. Vaginal and oral. When did that happen?

  None of your business.

  Oh it is my business, Trader. It’s my job. And I’m now going to tell you exactly what happened that night. Because I know, Trader. I know. It’s like I was there. You and her have the final argument. The final fight. It’s over. But you wanted to make love to her that one last time, didn’t you, Trader. And a woman, at such a moment, will let that happen. It’s human, to let that happen. One more time. On the bed. Then on the chair. You finished on the chair, Trader. You finished it. And fired the shot into her open mouth.

  Two shots. You said two shots.

  Yes I did, didn’t I. And now I’m going to tell you a secret that you already know. See this? This is the finding from the autopsy. Three shots, Trader. Three shots. And let me tell you, that wipes out suicide. That wipes out suicide. So Mrs. Rolfe upstairs did it, or the little girl in the street did it. Or you did it, Trader. Or you did it.

  The space around him goes gray and damp, and I feel the predator in me. He looks drunk—no, drugged. Like on speed: Not hammered but “blocked.” I would understand, later, what was happening in his head: The image that was forming there. I would understand because I would see it too.

  It was the look on his face made me ask him:

  How do you feel about Jennifer? Right now? Right this minute?

  Homicidal.

  Come again?

  You heard me.

  Good, Trader. I think we’re getting there. And that’s how you felt on the night of March fourth. Wasn’t it, Trader.

  No.

  All the hours I have spent in the interrogation room, over the years, are stacking up on me, I feel, all the hours, all the fluxes and recurrences of the heaviest kinds of feeling. It’s the things you have to hear and keep on hearing: From your own lips, also.

  I have a witness that puts you outside the house at seven thirty-five. Looking distressed. “Mad.” Riled-up. Sound familiar, Trader?

  Yes. The time. And the mood.

  Now. My witness says she heard the shots before you came out the door. Before. Sound about right, Trader?

  Wait.

  Okay. Sure I’ll wait. Because I understand. I understand the pressure you were under. I understand what she was putting you through. And why you had to do what you did. Any man might have done the same. Sure I’ll wait. Because you won’t be telling me anything I don’t already know.

  With its tin ashtray, its curling phonebook, its bare forty-watt, the interrogation room doesn’t have the feel of a confessional. In here, the guilty man is not seeking absolution or forgiveness. He is seeking approval: Grim approval. Like a child, he wants out of his isolation. He wants to be welcomed back into the mainstream—whatever he’s done. I have sat on this same honky metal chair and routinely said, with a straight face—no, with indignant fellow feeling: Well that explains it. Your mother-in-law had been sick for how long without dying? And you’re supposed to take that lying down? I have sat here and said: Enough is enough. You’re telling me the baby woke up crying again? So you taught it a lesson. Sure you did. Come on, man, how much shit can you take? Give Trader Faulkner a reversed baseball cap, a stick of gum, and a bad shave, and I would be leaning forward over the table and saying, again, absolutely as a matter of routine: It was the tennis, wasn’t it. It was that fucking tiebreak. The lasagne was as lousy as ever. And then she rounds it all off by giving you that kind of head?

  I cross myself inside and vow to go the extra mile for Colonel Tom—and give it a hundred percent, like I always do.

  Take your time, Trader. And consider this, while you think. Like I said, we’ve all been there, Trader. Think it hasn’t happened to me? You give them years. You give them your life. The next thing you know, you’re on the street. She used to tell you she couldn’t live without you. Now she’s saying you ain’t even shit. I can understand how it feels to lose a woman like Jennifer Rockwell. You’re thinking about the men who’ll be taking your place. And they won’t be slow in coming. Because she was hot, wasn’t she, Trader. Yeah, I know the type. She’ll fuck her way through your friends. Then she’ll get to your brothers. In the sack she’ll soon be doing them those nice favors you know all about. And she would, Trader. She would. Now listen. Let’s reach the bottom line. Dying words, Trader. The special weight, as testimony, of dying words.

  What are you saying, Detective?

  I’m saying the dispatcher’s call came through at nineteen thirty-five. We reached the scene minutes later. And guess what. She was still there, Trader. And she named you. Anthony Silvera heard it. John Macatitch heard it. I heard it. She gave you up. How about that, Trader? There. The cunt even gave you up.

  We have been in here for fifty-five minutes. His head is down. As evidence, a confession will tend to lose its power in step with the length of the interrogation. Yes, your honor—after a couple of weeks in there, he came clean. But I am mentally ready to go on for six hours, for eight, for ten. For fifteen.

  Say it, Trader. Just say it...Okay, I’m going to ask you to submit to a neutron-activation test. This will establish if you have recently used a firearm. Will you sit the polygraph? The lie-detector? Because I think you ought to know what the next stage is in all this. Trader, you’re going before a grand jury. Kno
w what that is? Yes, I’m going to grand-jury you, Trader. Yes I am... Okay. Let’s start from the beginning. We’re going to go through all this a few more times.

  He looks up slowly. And his face is clear. His expression is clear. Complicated, but clear. And suddenly I know two things. First, that he’s innocent. Second, that if he wants to, he can prove it.

  As it happens, Detective Hoolihan, I do know what a grand jury is. It’s a hearing to establish whether a case is strong enough to go to trial. That’s all. You probably think I think it’s the Supreme Court. Same as all the other befuddled bastards that come through here. This is so... pathetic. Oh, Mike, you poor bitch. Listen to you. But it’s not Mike Hoolihan talking. It’s Tom Rockwell. And the poor sap ought to blush for what he’s just put you through. It’s also kind of great—I mean, this whole thing is also kind of great. Last week I sat down with maybe ten or twelve people, one after the other. My mother, my brothers. My friends. Her friends. I kept opening my mouth and nothing happened. Not a word. But I’m talking now and let’s please go on talking. I don’t know how much you’ve told me is just plain bullshit. I’m assuming the ballistics document is not a hoax or a forgery and I’ll have to live with what it says. Maybe you’ll be good enough to tell me now what’s true and what isn’t. Mike, you’ve tied yourself up into all kinds of knots trying to make a mystery of this thing. It’s garbage, as you know. Some little mystery, all neat and cute. But there’s a real mystery here. An enormous mystery. When I say I feel homicidal, I’m not lying. On the night she died my feelings were what they always were. Devoted, and secure. But now...Mike, this is what happened: A woman fell out of a clear blue sky. And you know something? I wish I had killed her. I want to say: Book me. Take me away. Chop my head off. I wish I had killed her. Open and shut. And no holes. Because that’s better than what I’m looking at.

  If you peered in now, through the meshed glass, it wouldn’t seem such a strange way for things to end, in this room. Glimpsing this scene, a murder police would nod his head, and sigh, and move on.

  Suspect and interrogator have joined hands on the table. Both are shedding tears.

  I shed tears for him and tears for her. And also tears for myself I shed. Because of the things I’ve done to other people in this room. And because of the things this room has done to me. It’s pulled me into every kind of funny shape and size. It has left a coating on my body, everywhere, even inside, like the coating I used to expect to see, some mornings, all over my tongue.

  March 14

  I slept late and was woken around noon by another delivery from Colonel Tom. A dozen red roses—”with thanks, apologies, and love.” Also a sealed binder. Expedited, and very probably edited, by Colonel Tom, this was the autopsy report. I’d seen the movie. Now I had to read the review.

  It took a couple of pots of coffee and half a package of cigarettes before I could swim free of the liver haze that had come down on me during the night, like gruel. I showered also. And it must have been close to two before I sat myself down on the couch in my terrycloth bathrobe. I have this tape I like that Tobe made up for me: Eight different versions of “Night Train.” Oscar Peterson, Georgie Fame, Mose Allison, James Brown. We think of it as a kind of hymn to the low rent. The rent’s nothing: I mean, you don’t notice it. You notice the night train but you don’t notice the rent. So I had that playing, softly, in the corner, as I wrenched at the red tape. Spend ten years fucked up, spend ten years blowing on your ice cream, and you’re going to have a ten-year hangover (with another twenty-some waiting in line). Which is not to say that I wasn’t feeling all the extra from the day before. I felt fat and butter-colored, and already sweaty or still damp from the bathroom haze.

  Haec est corpus. This is the body:

  Jennifer, your height was five-ten, your weight 141.

  Your stomach contained a fully digested meal of scrambled eggs, lox, and bagels, and another meal, only partly digested, of lasagne.

  Lividity was only where it ought to have been. No one moved your body. No one arranged you.

  Blowback. On your right hand and forearm were found microscopic particles of blood and tissue. We call this blowback.

  Too, your right hand had undergone cadaveric spasm. Or spontaneous, and temporary, rigor mortis. The curve of the trigger and the patterning of the butt were embedded in your flesh. That’s how tight you gripped.

  Jennifer, you killed yourself.

  It’s down.

  March 16

  At CID, people aren’t talking about it. Like we took a beating on this one. But everyone now knows for sure that Jennifer Rockwell committed a crime on the night of March fourth.

  If she’d slid into the car and driven a hundred miles due south to the state line, then she could have died innocent. In our city, though, what she did was a crime. It’s a crime. The perfect crime, as always, in a way. She didn’t escape detection. But she escaped all punishment.

  And she escaped public disgrace. If disgrace is what you want to call it. Ask the coroner, who absolved her.

  Go far enough back, and a coroner was just a tax collector. To stay with the Latin of death: Coronae custodium regis. Keeper of the king’s pleas. He taxed the dead. And suicides lost all they had. Like other felons.

  These days, in this city, the coroner works out of the Chief Medical Examiner’s office. His name is Jeff Bright and he’s a pal of Tom Rockwell’s.

  Bright returned a finding of Undetermined. Colonel Tom, I know, pushed for Accidental. But he settled for Undetermined, as we all did.

  I said I never felt judged by her, even when I was defenseless against all censure. And, as of this writing, I feel no need to judge Jennifer Rockwell. With suicide, as with all the great collapses, exits, desertions, surrenders, it gets so there isn’t any choice.

  And there’s always enough pain. I keep thinking back to that time when I was holed up at the Rockwells’ house, sweating out my soul into the bedding. She too had her troubles. At nineteen—slimmer, gawkier, wider-eyed—she too was under siege. I remember now. One of those late-adolescent convulsions, with the parents pacing. There was a spurned boyfriend who wouldn’t or couldn’t let go. Yes, and a girlfriend too (what was it—drugs?), a housemate of hers, who’d also flipped out. Jennifer would give a jolt every time the phone or the doorbell rang. But yet, as sad and scared as she was, she would come and read to me and tend to me.

  She didn’t judge me. And I don’t judge her.

  Here’s what happened. A woman fell out of a clear blue sky.

  Yes. Well. I know all about these clear blue skies.

  March 18

  At the funeral, then, no color guard, no twenty-one-gun salute, no bagpipes. A couple of white hats, some gold braid and chest candy, and the full church service, with the little gray guy in his vestments whose language was saying: We take over now. Commit her to us, to this—the green fields and the church in the middle distance, its spire pointing heavenward. No, this wasn’t a police occasion. We were outnumbered. There we all stood, with our dropped eyes and our shared defeat, surrounded by an army of civilians: It seemed like the whole campus was in attendance. And I had never seen so many youthful and well-proportioned faces made hideous by grief. Trader was there, close to the family group. His brothers stood beside Jennifer’s brothers. Tom and Miriam faced the grave, motionless, like painted wood.

  Earth, receive the strangest guest.

  In the Dispersal Area I slipped away toward the yews for a dab of makeup and a cigarette. Grief brings out the taste of cigarettes, better than coffee, better than booze, better than sex. When I turned again I saw that Miriam Rockwell was approaching me. Under her black headscarf she looked like a beautiful beggar from the alleys of Casablanca or Jerusalem. Beautiful, but definitely asking, not giving. And I knew then that her daughter wasn’t done with me yet. Not by a damn sight.

  We held each other—partly for the warmth, because the sun itself felt cold that day, like a ball of yellow ice, chilling the sky. With Miriam, p
hysically, there seemed to be a little less of her to heft in your arms, but she wasn’t obviously reduced, scaled down, like Colonel Tom (standing some distance off, waiting), who looked about five feet three. Less crazy, though. Sadder, more sunken, but less crazy.

  She said, “Mike, I think this is the first time I’ve seen your legs.”

  I said, “Well enjoy.” We looked down at them, my legs in their black hose. And it felt okay to say, “Where did Jennifer get her legs from? Not from you, girl. You’re like me.” Jennifer’s legs belonged to some kind of racehorse. Mine are like jackhammers on castors. And Miriam’s aren’t a whole lot better.

  “I used to say, let her for the rest of her life wonder where she got her figure from. Let her try to piece it together. Her figure and her face. The legs? From Rhiannon. From Tom’s mother.”

  There was a silence. Which I lived intensely, with my cigarette. This was my moment of rest.

  “Mike. Mike, there’s something we now know about Jennifer that we want you to know about too. You ready for this?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “You didn’t see the toxicology report. Tom made it disappear. Mike, Jennifer was on lithium.”

  Lithium... I absorbed it—this lithium. In our city, in Drugburg here, a police quickly gets to know her pharmaceuticals. Lithium is a light metal, with commercial applications in lubricants, alloys, chemical reagents. But lithium carbonate (I think it’s a kind of salt) is a mood stabilizer. There goes our clear blue sky. Because lithium is used in the treatment of what I have heard described (with accuracy and justice) as the Mike Tyson of mental disorders: Manic depression.

  I said, “You never knew she had any kind of problem like that?”