“When people do this... When people do what she did, there’s a thing that makes it different. They end it, they get out. It’s over for them. But they kind of flip it over to you.”
He considered me closely for a second. He said, “No, I haven’t found that.”
“You okay, honey?”
I gave him my softest look. But I was daunted, I think. Could I honestly say that Jennifer was an act I could even take his mind off, let alone follow? And if you aren’t digging yourself, at such moments, then nobody else is going to dig you. And maybe my look wasn’t so soft. Maybe, now, my softest look just isn’t so soft.
“Yeah. You okay, Mike? This place,” he said, and he glanced around vaguely. “I realize... Have you ever lived with somebody who was physically beautiful? Physically.”
“No,” I said, without having to think. Without having to think of Deniss, of Duwain, of Shawn, of Jon.
“I realize now what an incredible luxury that was. This place—I guess this place is still pretty nice. But now it feels like a flop to me. Like a dump. Cold-water. Walk-up.”
All I came home withy then, was Making Sense of Suicide.
And in its pages, against all expectation (it is, as Trader said, lousily written, as well as smug and sanctimonious and seriously out-of-date), I would find what I needed to know.
The trail was cold, the trail was at absolute zero. But then I shivered—the way you do when you finally start to get warm.
NOW THERE’S NOTHING
I got back to the apartment around midnight.
In the bedroom I stood over Tobe for the longest time. What he goes through with his body. It’s all he can do just to sit there on a summer evening, watching a game show, with a beer can sweating into his hand. Even in sleep he suffers. Like a mountain is always in pain. The slipping discs of its tectonic plates. The gristle caught between crust and mantle.
When I quit working murders and had nothing much before me all day except the slow work of keeping dry, I used to stay up until the night train came—whenever. And then the long sleep. Until the night train came. Causing panic among the crockery. Shaking the ground beneath my feet.
And that’s what I intend to do now. Until whenever.
My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.
I did go. And I did straighten out the killing in the Ninety-Nine.
It was a totally God-awful murder—I mean, for hunger—but it was the kind of case that homicide cops have sex dreams about: Basically, a newsworthy piece of shit with frills. Basically, a politically urgent, headline-hogging dunker. Quickly solved by concentration and instinct.
The body of a fifteen-month-old baby boy had been found in a picnic cooler in a public recreation facility in the Ninety-Nine, over to Oxville. A precinct canvass had brought investigators to a rowhouse on the 1200 block of McLellan. By the time I showed there was a cordoned crowd of maybe a thousand people lining the street, a gridlock of media trucks, and, up above, a Vietnam of geostationary network helicopters.
Inside, five detectives, two squad supervisors and the Dep Comm were wondering how to get this show downtown without a prime-time riot. Meanwhile they were questioning a twenty-eight-year-old female, LaDonna, and her boyfriend, DeLeon. A decade ago, a month ago, in recounting this, I would have said that she was a PR and he was a Jake. Which is true. But suffice it to say that they were people of color. Also present, sitting on kitchen chairs and swinging their white-socked feet, were two silent little girls of thirteen and fourteen, Sophie and Nancy—LaDonna’s kid sisters. LaDonna also maintained that it was her baby and her Igloo.
It’s kind of an average Oxville scenario: The family is enjoying a picnic (this is January), the toddler wanders off (wearing only a diaper), they start searching for him (in this open field), and are unsuccessful (and go home). Forgetting the Igloo. According to LaDonna, the explanation stares you in the face. The toddler eventually returned and climbed into the picnic cooler and pulled the lid down (engaging the external catch) and suffocated. Whereas the ME’s initial finding, soon to be confirmed by autopsy, is that the child died of strangulation. According to DeLeon, things are a little more complicated. As they were leaving the recreational facility, their search abandoned, they saw a gang of white skinheads—known nazis and drugdealers—climb out of a truck and head for that part of the open field where the child was last seen.
We’re all sitting there, listening to these two brain surgeons, but I’m watching the girls. I’m watching Sophie and Nancy. And the whole thing went transparent. This was all it took: From the adjoining bedroom came the sound of a baby’s cry. A baby waking, dirty or hungry or lonely. LaDonna kept talking—she never skipped a beat—but Sophie rose an inch from her seat for a second, and Nancy’s face suddenly swelled with hatred. Immediately I saw:
LaDonna was not the mother of the murdered boy. She was his grandmother.
Sophie and Nancy were not LaDonna’s kid sisters. They were her daughters.
Sophie was the mother of the waking baby in the bedroom. Nancy was the mother of the baby in the Igloo.
Sophie was the murderess.
It was down. We even got a motive: Earlier the same day, Nancy had taken Sophie’s last diaper.
I was on the six o’clock news that night, nationwide.
“This murder was not about race,” I reassured 150 million viewers. “This murder was not about drugs.” Everyone can relax. “This murder was about a diaper.”
There are three things I didn’t tell Trader Faulkner.
I didn’t tell Trader that, in my view, Jennifer’s letter was not the work of a woman under terminal stress. I’ve seen a hundred suicide notes. They have things in common. They express insecurity—and they are barren, arid. “Serzone, depecote, tegretol—they sound like moral stances.” Toward the finish of the lives of suicides, more or less all their thoughts are self-lacerating. Whether they soothe or snarl, cringe or strut, suicide notes do not seek to entertain.
I didn’t tell Trader that with an affective, or emotional, disorder the sexual drive sharply declines. Nor did I add that with an ideational, or organic, disorder it almost invariably disappears. Unless the mania is itself sexual. Which gets noticed.
I didn’t tell Trader about Arn Debs. Not just because I didn’t have the heart. But because I never believed in Am Debs. I didn’t believe in Arn Debs for a single second. Time 1:45.
Random thoughts:
Homicide can’t change—and I don’t mean the department. It can evolve. It can’t change. There’s nowhere for homicide to go.
But what if suicide could change?
Murder can evolve in the direction of increasing disparity—new dis murders.
Upward disparity:
Sometime in the Fifties a man made a homicidal breakthrough. He planted and detonated a bomb on a commercial airliner: To kill his wife.
A man could bring down—perhaps has brought down—a 747: To kill his wife.
The terrorist razes a city with a suitcase H-bomb:
To kill his wife.
The President entrains central thermonuclear war: To kill his wife.
Downward disparity:
Every cop in America is familiar with the super-savagery of Christmas Day domestics. On Christmas Day, everyone’s home at the same time. And it’s a disaster ... We call them “star or fairy?” murders: People get to arguing about what goes on top of the tree. Here’s another regular: Fatal stabbings over how you carve the bird.