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, physically, 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?”