I just went through and sat on the great couch of Tobe’s lap for five minutes and watched them doing it. Grown adults acting like five-year-olds at a birthday party, with this routine: What do Americans think is America’s favorite breakfast? Cereal. Boing. Only 23 percent. Coffee and toast? Wheel All right.
What do Americans think is America’s choice suicide method. Sleeping pills. Yeah! Ow!
Where do Americans think France is? In Canada. Get down!
March 11
There’s an obit in this morning’s Sunday Times. In its blandness and brevity you can feel the exertion of all Tom Rockwell’s heft.
Just a resume, plus manner of death (“as yet undetermined”). And a photograph. This must have been taken, what, about five years ago? She is smiling with childish lack of restraint. Like you’d just told her something wonderful. If you skimmed over this photograph—the smile, the delighted eyes, the short hair emphasizing the long neck, the clean jaw—you’d think that here was someone who was about to get married kind of early. Not someone who had suddenly died.
Dr. Jennifer Rockwell. And her dates.
The little girl on Whitman, with her pink ribbons and bobby socks? She didn’t hear anything, on March fourth. Today, however, I went to see someone who did.
Mrs. Rolfe, the old dame on the top floor. It’s half after five and she’s half in the bag. So I don’t expect much. And I don’t get much. It’s sweet sherry she’s drinking: The biggest bang for the buck. Mr. Rolfe died many years ago and she’s quietly splashing her way through a widowhood that’s lasting longer than her marriage.
I ask about the shots. She says she was dozing (yeah, right), and the TV was on, and there were shots on the TV also. Some cop thing, naturally. She describes the report she heard for definite as unmistakably a gunshot, but no louder than a door being slammed two or three rooms away. You can feel the weight of the building: Constructed in an age of cheap materials. Mrs. Rolfe dialed 911 at 19:40. First officer showed at 19:55. Plenty of time, theoretically, for Trader to pack up and split. The little girl wheeled her bike in “around a quarter of eight,” according to her mother. Which puts Trader on the street—when? 19:30? 19:41?
“They fight ever?”
“Not to my knowledge, no,” says Mrs. Rolfe.
“How’d they seem to you?”
“Like the dream couple.”
But what kind of dream?
“It’s just so awful,” she says, making a move for the sauce. “It’s shaken me up, I admit.”
I used to be like that. Any bad news would do. Like your friend’s friend’s dog died.
“Mrs. Rolfe, did Jennifer seem depressed ever?”
“Jennifer? She was always cheerful. Always cheerful.”
Trader, Jennifer, Mrs. Rolfe: They were neighborly. Jennifer ran errands for her. If she needed something heavy shifted, Trader would move it. They kept a spare key for her. She kept a spare key for them. She still had that spare key, used to gain access on the night of March fourth. I say I’ll take that key, thank you, ma’am, and log it with Evidence Control. Left her my card, in case she needed anything. I could see myself looking in on her here, as I still do for several elderly parties in the Southern. I could see myself developing an obligation.
On the floor below: The door to Jennifer’s apartment is sashed with orange crime-scene tape. I slipped inside for a second. My first reaction, in the bedroom, was strictly police. I thought: What a beautiful crime scene. Totally undeteriorated. Not only the blood spatter on the wall but the sheets on the bed have the exact same pattern that I remember.
I sat on the chair with my .38 on my lap, trying to imagine. But I kept thinking about Jennifer the way she used to be. As gifted as she was, in body and mind, she never glassed herself off from you. If you ran into her, at a party, say, or downtown, she wouldn’t say hi and move on. She’d always be particular with you. She’d always leave you with something.
Jennifer would always leave you with something.
March 12
Today my shift was noon to eight. Sitting there smoking cigarettes and changing tapes, changing tapes—audio, visual, audiovisual. We’re casing the new hotel in Quantro, because we know the Outfit has money in it. I finally got the visual fix I was looking for: Two guys in the atrium, standing in the shadows back of the fountain. When we say the Outfit or the Mob, in this city, we don’t mean the Colombians or the Cubans, the Yakuza, the Jake posses, the El Ruks, the Crips and the Bloods. We mean Italians. So I watched these two greasers in blue suits that cost five grand, gesturing at each other, very formal. Men of honor, worthy of respect. Wise guys had long before stopped behaving that way, but then some movies came along that reminded them that their grandparents used to do that shit, with the honor, and so they started doing it, all over again.
Incidentally: We want that hotel.
I feel grateful for quiet workloads on days such as this, days of lethargy and faint but persistent nausea which have to do with my time of life, and my liver. More my liver than my unused womb. My only way around this is a transplant, a full organ transplant, which is possible, and expensive. But the precarious-ness—the risk of hepatic collapse—keeps me honest. If I bought a new liver, I’d just trash that one too.
Early afternoon Colonel Tom buzzed me and asked if I’d come up to his office on the twenty-third.
He is shrinking. His desk is big anyway but now it looks like an aircraft carrier. And his face like a little gun turret, with its two red panic buttons. He isn’t getting better.
I told him the move I planned for Trader.
You’ll go in hard, he said. Like I know you can.
Like you know I can, Colonel Tom.
Freestyle, Mike, he said. Flake him. I don’t care if he spills and walks. I just want to hear him say it.
To hear him say it, Colonel Tom?
I just want to hear him say it.
With Silvera or Overmars, you could always tell when a case was beating them down: They started shaving every other day. That, plus the usual symptoms of being wide awake for a month. Pretty soon they’re like the guys gathered around the braziers in the stockyards sidings—ghosts of a Depression section gang, lit by the flares... Colonel Tom’s cheeks were smooth. His cheeks were smooth. But he couldn’t take a razor to the brown smears of pain beneath his eyes which were deepening and hardening like scabs.
“Don’t buy all that Ivy League, Skull and Bones bullshit. The soft voice. The logic. Like even he thinks he’s too good to be true. There’s evil in him, Mike. He...”
Falling silent. His head vibrated, his head actually trembled to terrible imaginings. Imaginings he wanted and needed to be true. Because any outcome, yes, any at all, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, marathon tortures of Chinese ingenuity, of Afghan lavishness, any outcome was better than the other thing. Which was his daughter putting the .22 in her mouth and pulling the trigger three times.
Colonel Tom was now going to lay something on me. I could feel it coming. He roused himself. Briskly but also ditheringly, he leafed through a binder: Looked like a lab report out of the ME’s office. I wondered how Colonel Tom was monitoring and controlling the post-mortem findings as they came in piece by piece.
“Jennifer tested positive for ejaculate, vaginal and oral,” he said—and it was costing him to go on looking my way. “Oral, Mike. You see what I’m saying?”