He said yeah, sure. With someone like that you got to at least try. You’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t at least try.
I said and?
He said she brushed me off. But nicely.
I said so you didn’t get to call her an icebox or a dyke. Or religious. Was she religious?
He said she was a scientist. An astronomer. Astronomers aren’t religious. Are they?
I said how the hell would I know?
“Would you put that cigarette out, please, sir?”
I turned.
Guy says, “Excuse me. Ma’am. Would you put that cigarette out, please, ma’am?”
This is happening to me more and more often: The sir thing. If I introduce myself over the phone it never occurs to anybody that I’m not a man. I’m going to have to carry around a little pack of nitrogen or whatever—the stuff that makes you sound like Tweetie Bird.
Silvera lit a cigarette and said, “Why would she want to put her cigarette out?”
Guy’s standing there, looking around for a sign. Big guy, fat, puzzled.
“See that booth behind the glass door,” said Silvera, “with all those old files heaped up in it?”
Guy turns and peers.
“That’s the no-smoking section. If what you’re interested in is having people put their cigarettes out, you might find more play in there.”
Guy slopes off. We’re sitting around, smoking, and drinking the cowboy coffee, and I said hey. In the old days. Did I ever throw a pass at you? Silvera thought about it. He said as far as he remembered, I just slapped him around a few times.
“March fourth,” I said. “It was O’Boye notified Trader, right?”
On the night of the death, Detective Oltan O’Boye drives out to CSU to inform Professor Trader Faulkner. The deal is, Trader and Jennifer cohabit, but every Sunday night he takes to his cot in his office on campus. O’Boye is banging on his door around 23:15. Trader is already in pajamas, robe, slippers. Notified of his loss, he expresses hostile disbelief. There’s O’Boye, six feet two and three hundred pounds of raw meat and station-house dough fat in a polyester sport coat, with an alligator complexion and a Magnum on his hip. And there’s the Associate Professor, in his slippers, calling him a fucking liar and getting ready to swing his fists.
“O’Boye brought him downtown,” said Silvera. “Mike, I’ve seen some bad guys in my time, but this one’s a fucking beauty. His eyeglasses are as thick as the telescope at Mount Lee. And get this. He had leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. And there he sits on a bench in the corridor, bold as day, crying into his hands. Son of a bitch.”
I said he see the body?
He said yeah. They let him see her.
I said and?
He said he kind of leaned over it. Thought he was going to hold her but he didn’t.
I said he say anything?
He said he said Jennifer...Oh, Jennifer, what have you done?
“Detective Silvera?”
Hosni. And Overmars’s call. Silvera rose, and I started gathering our stuff. Then I gave him a minute before joining him by the phone.
“Okay,” I said. “How many three-in-the-heads we got?”
“It’s great. Seven in the last twenty years. No problem. We got a four-shot too.”
On our way to the door we took a glance at the no-smoking section. The guy was in there, alone, unattended, unserved, looking vigilant and strained.
“He’s like Colonel Tom,” said Silvera. “He’s in the wrong section. Oh and guess what. Five of them were women. It’s like we say. Men kill other people. It’s a guy thing. Women kill themselves. Suicide’s a babe thing, Mike.”
March 10
Saturday. In the morning, just for the hell of it, really, I do a half-block canvass on Whitman Avenue. It’s a nice neighborhood now. A middle-class enclave on the frontier of the Twenty-Seven: You got the old University Library over on Volstead, and the Business School on York. American cities like to fix it so that their seats of learning are surrounded by war zones (this is reality, pal), and it used to be that way around here. Ten years ago, Volstead Street was like the Battle of Stalingrad. Now it’s all nailed up and scorched-looking—vacated or plain abandoned, with hardly a hoody in sight. It’s tough to say who made this happen. The economy did it.
So as I move from door to door, under the elms, the residents are very, very cooperative. It wasn’t like doing a rowhouse block in Oxville or a project in Destry. Nobody told me to go suck cocks in hell. But nobody saw anything either. Or heard anything, on March fourth.
Until my last call. Yeah. Wouldn’t you know. A little girl, too, in pink ribbons and bobby socks. Silvera’s right: This case is so fucking cute. But it’s not pure ketchup, because kids do notice things, with their new eyes. The rest of us just looking out there and seeing the same old shit.
I’m winding it up with the mom, who suddenly says, “Ask Sophie. Sophie! Sophie was out riding her new bike up and down the street. I don’t let her leave the street on it.” Sophie comes into the kitchen and I hunker down on her.
Now, honey, this could be important.
“Number 43. Yeah. The one with the cherry tree.”
Think carefully, sweetheart.
“My chain came loose? I was trying to fix the chain?”
Go on, honey.
“And a man came out?”
What did he look like, sweetheart?
“Poor.”
Poor? Honey, what do you mean? Like shabby?
“He had patches on his clothes.”
It took me a second. He had patches on his elbows. Poor. That’s right: Don’t they say the darnedest things?
Sweetheart. How’d he seem?
“He looked mad. I wanted to ask him to help me but I didn’t.”
And soon I’m saying, “Thanks, honey. Thanks, ma’am.”
When I badge my way from door to door like this, and the women see me coming up the path—I don’t know what they think. There I am in my parka, my black jeans. They think I’m a diesel. Or a truck driver from the Soviet Union. But the men know at once what I am. Because I give them the eyeball—absolutely direct. As a patrol cop, on the street, that’s the first thing you have to train yourself to do: Stare at men. In the eyes. And then when I was plainclothes, and undercover, I had to train myself out of it, all over again. Because no other kind of woman on earth, not a movie star, not a brain surgeon, not a head of state, will stare at a man the way a police stares.
Back home I field the usual ten messages from Colonel Tom. He veers around, racking his brains for shit on Trader. A prior record of instability and temper-loss that amounts to a few family disagreements and a scuffle in a bar five years ago. Examples of impatience, of less than perfect gallantry, around Jennifer. Times he let her walk by a puddle without dunking his coat in it.
Colonel Tom is losing the story line. I wish he could hear how he sounds. Some of his beefs are so smallprint, they make me think of diss murders. Diss murders: When someone gets blown in half for a breach of form that would have slipped by Emily Post.
“What’s the game plan, Mike?”
I told him. Jesus... Anyway, he seemed broadly satisfied.
If the jury is still out on women police, then the jury is still out on Tobe. Still out, after all these months, and still hollering for transcripts of the judge’s opening address.
Right now the guy is next door watching a taped quiz show where the contestants have been instructed beforehand to jump up and down and scream and whoop and french each other every time they get an answer right. The multiple-choice questions do not deal in matters of fact. They deal in hearsay. The contestants respond, not with what they think, but with what they think everybody else thinks.