Phyllida came floating down the passage like a nurse. I moved to the door. She herself had no real weight in this. She was just the connect.
“How many?” I called. “Five? Six?”
“I think six.”
And I was gone.
Hurry hurry. Because you see: This is where we came in. It’s five p.m. on April second. In an hour I meet with Paulie No. I will ask him two questions. He will give me two answers. Then it’s a wrap. It’s down. And again I wonder: Is it the case? Is it reality, or is it just me? Is it just Mike Hoolihan?
Trader says it’s like calling shots in a ballgame. It even fucks with your eyes. You call a good ball out because you wish it out. You wish it out so bad that you see it out. You have an agenda—to win, to prevail. And it fucks with your eyes.
When I was working murders it sometimes felt like TV: But the wrong way around. As if some dope had watched a murder mystery (based on a true story?) and was bringing it back for you the wrong way around. As if TV was the master criminal, beaming out gameplans to the somnambulists of the street. You’re thinking: This is ketchup. Ketchup from a squeezer that’s getting crusty around the spout.
I am taking a good firm knot and reducing it to a mess of loose ends. And why would I see it like that if it wasn’t so? It’s the last thing I want. This way, I don’t win. This way, I don’t prevail.
But let’s ride with the ketchup—with the procedural ketchup of questions and numbers and expert testimony. Then we can do the noir. I may still be provably wrong.
This is where we came in.
On the phone I said that I would be buying, but when we’re standing at the bar in the Decoy Room and facing that palisade of booze Paulie No flattens out a twenty and asks me:
What’s your poison?
And I say seltzer.
There’s a lilt in his voice and his fold-lidded eyes are downward glancing. Since he’s apparently twigged that I’m off from CID just now, he seems to think that this is tantamount to a date. Unexpected, because I’d always fingered him for a fruit. Like every other pathologist you ever came across. As if anybody gives a fuck, one way or the other.
We talk about five-irons and RBIs and whether the Pushers have what it takes to beat the Rapists next Saturday, or whatever, and then I say,
Paulie. This conversation never happened, okay?
... What conversation?
Thanks, Paulie. Paulie. Remember when you cut the Rockwell girl?
Most definitely. Every day it should be like that.
It beats bursters, right, Paulie?
It beats floaters. Hey. We going to talk dead bodies? Or we going to talk living meat?
No speaks perfect American but he looks like Fu Manchu’s nephew. I’m staring at his mustache, which is shiny but also patchy, threadbare. Christ, he’s like the guy under the earphones in the Crescent. I mean it’s pretty basic, isn’t it: Why have a mustache when it just didn’t happen? His hands are clean, puffy, and gray. Like the hands of some dish-plunging stiff in a diner kitchen. I congratulate myself. I’m flesh and blood, not hide and ice: I can still get the creeps around Paul No, a state cutter who loves his job. But every ten minutes I’m shuddering at the thought of how hardbitten I’ve gotten.
“The night is young, Paulie. Eric: Another beer for Dr. No.”
“...With suicides, know what they used to do?”
“What, Paulie?”
“Dissect the brain looking for special lesions. Suicide lesions. Caused by?”
“Tell me.”
“Masturbation.”
“That’s interesting. This is interesting also. There was a tox report on the Rockwell girl. You didn’t see it.”
“Why would I?”
“Yeah well the Colonel had it shitcanned.”
“Mm-hm. What was it? Marijuana?” Then, horrifically overdoing the mock-horror, he said, “Cocaine?”
“Lithium.”
Somehow, we all bought the lithium. We all swallowed it. Colonel Tom, down to his last marble. Hi Tulkinghorn, going lean and mean into his own little end-zone. Trader—because he believed her dying words. Because he felt the special weight, as testimony, of dying words. And I, too, bought and swallowed. Because otherwise...
“Lithium?” he said. “No way. Lithium? Fuck no.”
Here we are in the Decoy Room, the day after April Fool’s: These, surely, are not Jennifer’s jokes. It’s just the world being heavyhanded. Similarly, in the center of the room, over the white baby grand, the sleepy-looking... Let me recast that sentence. Over the white baby grand the pianist with the big hair is playing “Night Train.” Of all things. In the Oscar Peterson style, but with trills and graces. Not passion and muscle. I make my head do a half circle and expect to see, straddling the next stool along, Am Debs’s tense and keglike thighs. But all I get are the Monday-night drinkers, and decoys, decoys, and the wall of hooch, and the bubbling tideline on No’s mustache.
I say so don’t tell me. An individual’s on that shit for a time. Maybe a year. What would you see?
He says oh you’d most certainly be seeing signs of renal damage there. After maybe a month. Most definitely.
I say seeing what signs?
He says distal tubules where the salt was reabsorbed. The thyroid, also, would underfunction and enlarge.
I say and the Rockwell girl?
He says no fucking way. Her organ tree was like a wall chart. The kidneys? They were dinner. No, man. She was—she was like Plan A.
“Paulie, this conversation never happened.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“I believe you’re going to keep that promise, Paulie. I always liked and trusted you.”
“You did? I thought you had a thing against slants.”
“Me? No,” I said. And earnestly. I have no idea what I’m feeling. Random stabs of love and hate. But I gave the cop shrug and said, “No, Paulie. It’s just that you seemed so absorbed in your job.”
“That’s true.”
“This has been nice and we’ll do it again soon. But just so we understand each other. You keep your mouth shut about Jennifer Rockwell. Or Colonel Tom will put you out. Believe it, Paul. You won’t be cutting on Battery and Jefferson. You’ll be bucket boy at Final Rest. But I trust you and I know you’ll keep your promise to me. That’s what you got my respect for.”
“Have another one, Mike.”
“For the road.”
I felt relief like luxury when I added, “Just a seltzer. Yeah, sure, why not?”
Tobe is attending a video-game tournament and will not be home till eleven. It’s now nine. At ten I have a phone date with Colonel Tom. So it should work out. I’m sitting here at the kitchen table with my notebook, my tape recorder, my PC. I’m wearing my latest golf pants, with the big gold check, and a white Brooks Brothers shirt. And I’m thinking... Oh, Jennifer, you wicked girl.
It’s a phone date with Colonel Tom because I won’t be able to do this face to face. For several reasons. One of them being that Colonel Tom always knows when I’m not telling the truth. He’ll say, “Meet my eye, Mike”—like a parent. And I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Today in the Times there’s a piece about a recently recognized mental disorder called the Paradise Syndrome. I thought: Look no further. That was what Jennifer had. Turns out it’s just this thing where ignorant billionaires—stars of soap and rock and ballpark—succeed in rigging up some worries for themselves. Some boobytraps—pitfalls in paradise. Zugts afen mir. Say it about me. I look around the apartment—the hip-high heaps of computer magazines, the dust on my framed commendations. No less than what you’d expect, in the habitat of half a ton of slob and slut. No Paradise Syndrome here. We’re clean. In the Times there’s also a follow-up report and an editorial about the microbes on the rock from Mars. A single smear of three-billion-year-old jizz, and suddenly they’re all saying, “We are not alone.”