Night Train Read online

  I said so you’re a friend of Jennifer Rockwell’s.

  He said yeah. Well. I only met her but once.

  I said when?

  He said oh, maybe a month back. I make these business trips regular, like every three or four weeks?

  Met her on my last trip. February twenty-eight. I remember because no leap year. Met her February twenty-eight.

  I said where?

  He said here. Right here. At the bar there. She was sitting a couple of stools away and we got talking.

  I said she was here alone. Not waiting for anybody.

  He said yeah, sitting at the bar there with a white wine. You know.

  I said so what were you thinking?

  He said to tell you the truth, I thought she was like a model, or maybe even some kind of high-class call girl. Like you get in the better hotels. Not that I was fixing to pay for it. Then we got talking. I could tell she was a nice girl. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band. She married?

  I said what did you talk about?

  He said life. You know. Life.

  I said yeah? What? Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. Look before you leap. That kind of stuff?

  He said hey. What is this? I’m answering your questions, okay?

  I said you tell her about your wife and kid?

  He said it didn’t come up.

  I said so you made a date. For tonight.

  He said listen. I conducted myself like a gentleman.

  Debs went into a thing about the company he works for in Dallas, how they had a guy come down from DC to give a seminar on social etiquette. A seminar on how to avoid sexual-harassment suits. He reminded me that you can’t be too careful, not these days, and he always conducted himself like a gentleman.

  I said what happened?

  He said I said you feel like some dinner? Here at the hotel? She said I’d like that but tonight’s a problem. Let’s do it next time you’re in town.

  I said how come she gave you my phone number?

  He said your phone number?

  I said yeah. We talked yesterday.

  He said that was you? Hey. Go figure. She said it wasn’t her number. Said it was a friend’s number. Said if I called her at home there might be a problem with the guy she lived with.

  I said okay, swinger. That’s not how it happened. Here’s how it happened. You were hassling her. Wait! You were hassling her, in the bar, in the foyer, I don’t know. Maybe you followed her out into the street. She gave you the number to get you off her back. You were—

  He said that’s not what happened. I swear. Okay, I escorted her out to the cab stand. And she wrote down the number for me. Look. Look.

  From his inside pocket Debs produced his wallet. With his big fingers he leafed heavily through some loose business cards: There. He held it up for me. My number followed by Jennifer’s crisp signature. Followed by two exes, crosses—for kisses.

  I said you kiss her, Arn?

  He said yeah I kissed her.

  And he paused. It was gradually dawning on Debs that the momentum had turned his way. He was feeling good again now. What with the fomenting adrenaline, and the double Dewar’s he’d long gotten down himself, as if against time.

  “Yeah I kissed her. There a law against that now?”

  “With your tongue, Arn?”

  He straightened a finger at me. “I conducted myself with the upmost correctitude. Hey. Chivalry ain’t dead. What she die of anyhow?”

  Well that’s something. She’s dead. But chivalry isn’t. “Accident. With a firearm.”

  “Hell of a thing. All that beauty. And the poise, you know?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Mr. Debs.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  He leaned closer. His breath, over and above the booze, was richly soured with male hormones. He said,

  “We talked on the phone last night, I thought you were a guy. Not a little guy either. Somebody my size. People make mistakes. Right? I got real sure you were a woman when you showed me your shield. Give me another look at it. For your information, in my room I got a bottle of Krug in a ice bucket. Maybe tonight ain’t a total wipe. Hey, what’s the rush? You on duty? Come on. Stick around and have a real drink.”

  -+=*=+-

  In the old days I would sometimes booze my way through clinical aversion. I used to take the pills that give you epileptic fits if you mix them with alcohol. And I’d mix them with alcohol. It felt like it was worth it. What the fuck. The convulsions only last for a few days. Then you don’t have a problem.

  I couldn’t do that now. Mix me with alcohol, and the result would be fulminant hepatic failure. I couldn’t drink my way through that shit. Because I wouldn’t be around.

  It’s not too late. I’m going to change my name. To something feminine. Like Detective Jennifer Hoolihan.

  For a girl to have a boy’s name, and to keep it—that’s not so unusual. I’ve come across a Dave and a Paul who never tried to pretty things up with Davina or Pauline. I’ve even met another Mike. We stuck with it. But how many grown men do I know who are still called Priscilla?

  Here’s something I’ve often wondered: Why did my father call me Mike if he was going to fuck me? Was he a fruit, too, on top of everything else? Here’s something even more mysterious: I never stopped loving my father. I have never stopped loving my father. Whenever I think of him, before I can do anything about it, I feel great love flooding my heart.

  And here comes the night train. First, the sound of knives being sharpened. Then its cry, harsh but symphonic, like a chord of car horns.

  ALL HOLE

  The dispatcher directs you to a large Tudor-style residence on Stanton Hill. Two tearful parents, supported by a small cast of tearful servants, lead you up the staircase. With your partner at your side (Silvera, in this case), you enter a bedroom infested with stereo and computer equipment, with CDs and PCs, with posters of babes and rock stars all over the walls, and on the bed is the corpse of some poor kid with a weak leer and an earring. His pants are down around his hightops. He is lying in a pool of skin magazines and amyl nitrate. There is also a rented adult video in the VCR and, beside the pillow, a remote smothered in latents. And he has a polyethylene bag half wrenched off his face. So you spend an hour with the folks, saying what you can, while the science crew come and go. And as soon as you’re back in the unmarked, you both give the cop shrug and one of you will start:

  Well at least he died in a good cause.

  Right. He didn’t give it up lightly. And you know what else?

  What?

  He was doing it for all of us.

  He had no thought for himself up there.

  He was pushing out the boundaries for all of us.

  Laying his life on the line for all of us.

  Greater love hath no man.

  Than him who.

  Lays down his life.

  For a better handjob.

  Well put. For a better handjob.

  With TV you expect everything to measure up. Things are meant to measure up. The punishment will answer the crime. The crime will fall within the psychological profile of the malefactor. The alibi will disintegrate. The gun will smoke. The veiled woman will suddenly appear in the courthouse.

  Motive, motive. “Motive”: That which moves, that which impels. But with homicide, now, we don’t care about motive. We never give it a second’s thought. We don’t care about the why. We say: Fuck the why. Motive might have been worth considering, might have been pretty reliable, might have been in okay shape half a century ago. But now it’s all up in the fucking air. With the TV.

  I’ll tell you who wants a why. Jurors want a why. They want reruns of Perry Mason and The Defenders. They want Car Fifty-Four, Where Are You?

  They want commercials every ten minutes or it never happened.

  That’s homicide. This is suicide. And we all want a why for suicide.

  And how’s it looking?

  Tomorro
w night I’m seeing Trader Faulkner, and something new, something more, may emerge from that. ‘But otherwise it’s pretty much made. It’s down. Isn’t it? I have followed up all the names in Jennifer’s address book. I have been through the phone records and the credit-card accounts. And there’s only one gap: No hit on the lithium. Tony Silvera has been onto Adrian Drago in Narcotics, and they gave their snitches a roust. But this isn’t a street drug we’re talking about. And I don’t build on nailing the connect.

  But—hey. Jennifer Rockwell was a cleavage in a lab coat. But she wasn’t Mary Poppins. A spinning top looks still and stable until the force starts to weaken. A tremor, then it slows and slews. It wobbles and reels and clatters. Then it stops.

  Answers are coming together, are they not? We got sex and drugs and rock and roll. This is more than you usually get. This is plenty. This is practically TV.

  So why don’t I buy it?

  I keep thinking about her body. I keep thinking about Jennifer’s body and the confidence she had in it. See her in a swimsuit and you just thought... One summer day five or six years ago the Rockwells took the whole roof pool at the Trum, for their anniversary, and when Jennifer came out of the cabana and walked toward us in her white one-piece we all fell silent for a beat, and Silvera said, “Hm. Not bad.” Then Grandma Rebka clapped her hands together and wailed, “Zugts afen mir!” It should be said about me. We should all be so lucky. The sight of her instantly had you going along with the idea that the basis of attraction is genetic. Get Jennifer, and your genes would surge forth, in a limo. Her body was kind of an embarrassment, a thrilling embarrassment, to everyone (even Trader dipped his head). But it wasn’t an embarrassment to her. The confidence with which she carried it was self-evident, self-sufficient—I guess the word I want is “consummate.” She never needed to give it a moment’s thought. And when you consider how much the rest of us think about our bodies, and what kind of thoughts these are. Yes, absolutely right. We should all be so lucky.

  Something else was said that day, around the roof pool at the Trum. The two grandmas, Rebka and Rhiannon, who died within a month of each other the following year—they were a great double act. As a ten-year-old Rebka had cleaned the streets of Vienna with her father’s skullcap. And she was an angel of light. Silver-spoon Rhiannon, on the other hand, was dour, sarcastic, and mean. And Welsh. If you thought Schadenfreude was a German word, then five minutes with Rhiannon would make you think again. And the mouth on her, still with that accent. She could even shock me. In a long life of uninterrupted ease, Grandma Rhiannon had one real cause for complaint. All her children grew and flourished. But she’d had fifteen of them.

  Out by the pool, that day, she said,

  “I’m like a horse in the bullring. I’ve got bags of sawdust in me.”

  And I said, “Is that a Welsh thing? I thought it was an Irish thing, having a ton of kids.”

  “No, not reely. It was him. Billy. It was him wanted them. I only wanted two. Even after little Alan he was on at me to have more.”

  “More?”

  “Day and night. Just one more. I’d say, ‘Come on, Billy. Give it a rest. I’m awl awl as it is.’ “

  “You’re what?”

  She pronounced the two words the same. Awl awl. All hole.

  That’s what I sometimes think this case is.

  All hole.

  CHANGING ALL THE GIVENS

  Tonight’s my date with Trader.

  One thing I do, before I go over there, is dig out the transcript of the interrogation I conducted downtown. My effort, there in the small interrogation room, was misdirected. But I’m impressed by its tenacity. Now I see this:

  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.

  I missed that earlier, and I now remind myself to pick up on it tonight. Why distressed?

  Another thing I do, before I leave, is spend about an hour in the bathroom with the concealer. And the contour powder and the lip-liner. And the tweezers for Christ’s sake. Too, I’d washed my hair the night before, and had an early one. I guess a person will sometimes do this, no real reason attaching except for herself, to feel at her best around a man she likes. Another explanation may be that I have a crush on Trader. Well? So? It doesn’t mean anything. Say only this: If he wants comfort, I will give it to him. On my way out the door Tobe looked at me oddly. Tobe’s okay. He’s a gentle giant. As opposed to a violent one. As opposed to Deniss, Shawn, Jon, Duwain.

  Long ago I learned that I cannot get the good guys.

  I am one of the good guys, and I go out there and get the bad guys. I can get the bad guys.

  But I cannot get the good guys.

  I just cannot get the good guys.

  It was a long evening, and it went in drifts.

  Trader has moved back into the apartment. My death scene has been destroyed: It’s been redecorated. The chair in the bedroom—the same chair?—sits swathed in a white sheet. A stepladder still stands in the corner. Trader says he hasn’t yet slept in there. He ends up on the couch. Watching TV.

  “Hey. A TV. You got a life at last,” I said. Innocent words were proving difficult to find. “What’s it like, being here?”

  “It’s better being here than not being here.”

  Again: Taken generally, this was not an opinion that Jennifer Rockwell would have shared.

  I stood around in the kitchen while he fixed me a soda. Ice and lemon. Trader’s body was always slow-moving. This night his face, too, seemed to bear the shadow of ponderousness. If it wasn’t for the math and everything, at odd moments you might almost have figured him for one of those morons in a matinee mask—one of those guys given good looks for no good reason. Except to spread a little more grief. But then the light of intelligence would return to the brown softness of his eyes. I tried to remember if he’d always had this frown, this shadow. Or did he pick it up a month ago, on March fourth? The birthdate of so much stupefaction. He was drinking. He drank steadily all evening. Jack Daniel’s. Rocks.

  Raising his glass, he turned to me and said, “Well, Mike?”

  But he never turned to me and said, What have you got? What did you learn? I wanted to know what he knew. He didn’t want to know what I knew.

  At times, our talk was very—what shall I say?—orderly:

  How about children, Trader? I guess I’m still looking for a precipitant that’s the right shape and size. Might she have had anxiety about that?

  There was no pressure on her. I was pretty keen but I’d never push it. If she wanted none—fine. If she wanted ten—also fine. It’s like abortion. It’s the woman’s call.

  This is left-field: How did she feel about abortion?

  It was about the only agenda-type issue she was interested in. Libertarian, but with great qualms. Me too. That’s why I goof off on the subject and hand it over to the women.

  -+=*=+-

  At times, not so orderly. At times, our talk tended toward the not so orderly:

  “Look at this.”

  He was in the armchair, his reading chair, next to a round table on which books were stacked—also lamp, glass, framed photographs. Now he reached for a certain ruffled paperback, saying,

  “It was in the shelves with its spine to the wall. I can’t believe she actually read it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s so lousily written.”

  A small-press publication, called Making Sense of Suicide. By some doctor with two middle initials. I flicked through it. Not one of those how-to guides that have recently been getting a lot of play. Written more from the counseling end of the operation—crisis center, help-line, talk-down.

  “She made marks,” I said.

  “Yeah. Habit. She always read with a pencil in her hand. I don’t know when she bought it. Could have been anytime in the last ten years.”

  “She signed it.”
>
  “But she didn’t date it. And her signature—her handwriting settled down pretty early. Why don’t you nuke it, Mike? With your forensic arsenal. The boron-activation test. Wasn’t that it?”

  I sat back. I couldn’t quite get a take on his mood. I said, “That was Colonel Tom, Trader. The guy was down to his last marble. I had to do it for Tom.”

  “Hey, I got one for you. Tom did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Killed Jennifer. Murdered Jennifer.”

  “Come again?”

  “He’s the least likely guy. So it has to be him. Come on, we can cook this shit up. All you need is a little irresponsibility. It’s like redecorating the bedroom—you can do it a hundred ways. Miriam did it. Bax Denziger did it. You did it. But let’s stick with Tom. Tom did it. He waits till I leave. Then he sneaks in and does it.”

  “Okay. Then why doesn’t he let it sleep? Why’d he crank me up? What am I doing sitting here tonight?”

  “That’s a blind. That’s just a diversion. So the truth would never occur to anyone sane.”

  “Motive?”

  “Easy. I got it. Jennifer recalled a terrible secret from her past. A memory she tried to suppress. With drugs.”

  “With drugs?”

  “When she was just a little girl, she asked her daddy...why he came to her bedroom. Why he made her do those bad things. Why he...Oh no. Oh. I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “That’s okay. But let’s stop this. Jennifer did it.”

  “Jennifer did it. See? Why doesn’t everyone just keep their mouth shut. Why doesn’t everyone...just shut the fuck up.”

  Then a revelation:

  Did you talk to Professor Denziger?

  Yeah I talked to Bax. He told you what—

  Yeah, he did. He agonized good about that. I thought it was kind of typical of her in a way. Not the incompetence. That wasn’t typical. But how she did it. Changing the values. Changing all the givens. Why’s that?

  Like if you said to her, I don’t know, who’s going to win the election in November, she had trouble getting interested. Because of the givens. The parameters. Not just the candidates—the whole thing. For her the thread had gotten lost so long ago.