As I was speaking those words, Deniss, in actual fact, was scowling through the windshield of a U-Haul, taking himself and all his belongings at high speed toward the state line.
So I did live alone. I didn’t live with Deniss.
Is that Tobe now, starting up the stairs? Or is it the first rumor of the night train? The building always seems to hear it coming, the night train, and braces itself as soon as it hears in the distance that desperate cry.
I don’t live alone. I don’t live alone. I live with Tobe.
March 9
Just come back from my meet with Silvera.
The first thing he said to me was: “I hate this.”
I said you hate what?
He said the whole damn thing.
I said Colonel Tom thinks it plays to homicide.
He said what does?
I said the three shots.
He said Rockwell never was any good. On the streets.
I said he got shot in the line for Christ’s sake. He got shot in the fucking line.
Silvera paused.
“When was the last time you took one for the state?” I asked him.
Silvera went on pausing. But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t thinking of the time, way back in company lore, that Tom Rockwell stopped one in the Southern, as a beat cop, while flushing hoodies from a drug corner. No, Silvera was just contemplating his own career curve.
I lit a cigarette and said, “Colonel Tom has it playing to homicide.”
He lit a cigarette and said, “Because that’s all he’s got. You shoot yourself once in the mouth. That’s life. You shoot yourself twice. Hey. Accidents happen. You shoot yourself three times. You got to really want to go.”
We were in Hosni’s, the little gyro joint on Grainge. Popular among police for its excellent smoking section. Hosni himself isn’t a smoker. He’s a libertarian. He threw out half his tables just to skirt city law. I’m not proud of my habit, and I know that Hosni’s crusade is one we’re eventually going to lose. But all cops smoke their asses off and I figure it’s part of what we give to the state—our lungs, our hearts.
Silvera said, “And this was a .22. A revolver.”
“Yeah. Not a zip. Or a faggot gun. You know like a derringer or something. The old lady upstairs. She said she heard one shot?”
“Or she’s woken by one shot and then hears the second or the third. She’s blacked out on sherry in front of the TV. What does she know.”
“I’ll go talk to her.”
“This case is so fucking cute,” said Silvera. “When Paulie No fluoroscoped her, suddenly we’re looking at three bullets. One’s still in her head, right? One’s in Evidence Controclass="underline" The one we dug out of the wall at the scene. After the autopsy we go back. There’s only one hole in the wall. We dig out another round. Two bullets. One hole.”
In itself this was no big deal. Police are pretty blase about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and “the magic bullet”? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn’t be there.
I said, “I’ve seen twice. In suicides. I can imagine three.”
“Listen, I’ve chased guys who’ve taken three in the head.”
The truth was we were waiting on a call. Silvera had asked Colonel Tom to let Overmars in on this. Seemed like the obvious guy, with his Quantico connections. And right now Overmars was stirring up the federal computers, looking for documented three-in-the-head suicides. I was finding it kind of a weird calculation. Five in the head? Ten? When were you sure?
“What you get this morning?”
“Nothing but schmaltz. What you get?”
“Yeah, right.”
Silvera and myself had also been working the phones that morning. We’d called everybody who was likely to have an opinion about Jennifer and Trader, as a couple, and we’d both compiled the same dimestore copy about how they seemed to have been made for each other—in heaven. There was, to put it mildly, no evidence of previous gunplay. So far as anyone knew, Trader had never raised his voice, let alone his fist, to Jennifer Rockwell. It was embarrassing: Sweet nothings all the way.
“Why was she nude, Tony? Colonel Tom said Miss Modest never even owned a bikini. Why would she want to be found that way?”
“Nude is the least of it. She’s dead, Mike. Hell with nude.”
We had our notebooks open on the table. There were our sketches of the scene. And Jennifer drawn as a stick figure: One line for the torso, four lines for the limbs, and a little circle for the head, at which an arrow points. A stick figure. Was that ever inadequate.
“It says something.”
Silvera asked me what.
“Come on. It says I’m vulnerable. It says I’m a woman.”
“It says get a load of this.”
“Playmate of the Month.”
“Playmate of the Year. But it’s not that kind of body. More of a sports body with tits.”
“Maybe we’re coming in at the end of a sex thing here. Don’t tell me that didn’t occur to you.”
Be a police long enough, and see everything often enough, and you will eventually be attracted to one or another human vice. Gambling or drugs or drink or sex. If you’re married, all these things point in the same direction: Divorce. Silvera’s thing is sex. Or maybe his thing is divorce. My thing, plainly, was drink. One night, near the end, a big case went down and the whole shift rolled out to dinner at Yeats’s. During the last course I noticed everybody was staring my way. Why? Because I was blowing on my dessert. To cool it. And my dessert was ice cream. I was a bad drunk, too, the worst, like seven terrible dwarves rolled into one and wedged into a leather jacket and tight black jeans: Shouty, rowdy, sloppy, sleazy, nasty, weepy, and horny. I’d enter a dive and walk up the bar staring at each face in turn. No man there knew whether I was going to grab him by the throat or by the hog. And I didn’t know either. It wasn’t much different at CID. By the time I was done, there wasn’t a cop in the entire building who, for one reason or the other, I hadn’t slammed against a toilet wall.
Silvera is younger than me and the wheels are coming off his fourth marriage. Until he was thirty-five, he claims, he balled the wife, girlfriend, sister and mother of every last one of his arrests. And he certainly has the look of the permanent hardon. If Silvera was in Narcotics, you’d right away make him for dirty: The fashionably floppy suits, the touched-up look around the eyes, the Italian hair trained back with no part. But Silvera’s clean. There’s no money in murder. And a hell of a detective. Fuck yes. He’s just seen too many movies, like the rest of us.
“She’s naked,” I said, “on the chair in her bedroom. In the dark. There are times when a woman will willingly open her mouth to a man.”
“Don’t tell Colonel Tom. He couldn’t handle it.”
“Or play this. Trader leaves at 19:30. As usual. And then her other boyfriend shows.”
“Yeah, in a jealous rage. Listen, you know what Colonel Tom is trying to do.”
“He wants a who. I tell you this. If it’s a suicide, I’m going to feel an awful big why.”
Silvera looked at me. Police really are like foot-soldiers in this respect at least. Ours not to reason why. Give us the how, then give us the who, we say. But fuck the why. I remembered something—something I’d been meaning to ask.
I said you make a pass at anything that stirs, right?
He said oh yeah?
I said yeah. If your rash isn’t acting up. You ever try Jennifer?