Martin Amis - Night Train

But if there’s one aspect of homicide work that women do about a thousand times better than men it’s riding a note. Women are good at that—at breaking the news. Men fuck it up because of the way they always handle emotion. They always have to act the n.o.d., so they come on like a preacher or a town crier, or all numb and hypnotized like someone reading off a list of commodity futures or bowling scores. Then halfway through it hits them what they’re doing and you can tell they’re close to losing it. I’ve seen beat cops burst out laughing in the face of some poor little schnook whose wife just walked under a Mack truck. At such moments, men realize that they’re impostors, and then anything can happen. Whereas I would say that women feel the true weight of the thing immediately and after that it’s a difficult event but not an unnatural one. Sometimes, of course, they crack up laughing—I mean the supposedly bereaved. You’re just getting into your my-sad-duty routine and they’re waking up the neighbors at three in the morning to pop a party.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

The Rockwells’ residence is in the northwestern suburbs, out to Blackthorn: Twenty minutes. I had Johnny Macatitch stay in the car while I went around the back way like I normally would when paying a call. I was coming by the side of the house and I paused. To step on my cigarette. To breathe. And I could see them, in through the leaded windows and past the potted plants of the kitchen, Miriam and Colonel Tom, dancing. Dancing the twist, slow, and without a whole lot of bend in the knees, to the lecherous saxophone frying like the dinner in the pan. They clinked glasses. Red wine. Up above the moon throbbed full, and the clouds it raced through seemed to be the moon’s clouds rather than our clouds. Yes, an unforgettably beautiful night. And that beauty was part of this story. As if staged for my benefit, like the picture framed by the kitchen window: A forty-year marriage that still had fucking in it. Under a night so sweet it looked like day.

When you’re bringing news of the kind I was bringing there are physical ramifications. The body feels concentrated. The body feels important. It has power, because it brings powerful truth. Say what you like about this news, but it’s the truth. It’s the truth. It is the case.

I rapped on the half-glass back door.

Colonel Tom turned: Pleased to see me. Not even a little frown of inconvenience, like maybe I was going to take the shine off his evening. But the instant he opened the door I could feel my face collapsing. And I knew what he thought. He thought I was back on it. I mean the booze and all.

“Mike. Jesus, Mike, are you okay?”

I said, “Colonel Tom? Miriam?” But Miriam was already falling away and fading from my sight. Falling away at thirty-two feet per second squared. “You lost your daughter on this day. You lost your Jennifer.”

He looked like he was still trying to smile his way past it. The smile now starting to plead. They had David one year, Yehoshua the next. And then, a decade and a half later: Jennifer.

“Yes she’s gone,” I said. “By her own hand.”

“This is nuts.”

“Colonel Tom, you know I love you and I’d never lie to you. But it seems your baby girl took her own life, sir. Yes she did. Yes she did.”

They fetched their coats and we drove downtown. Miriam stayed in the car with Johnny Mac. Colonel Tom made the ID leaning on a freezer door in the ME’s office on Battery and Jeff.

Oltan O’Boye would be riding east, to campus. Taking the news to Trader Faulkner.

I woke up this morning and Jennifer was standing at the end of my bed. She was waiting for my eyes to open. I looked, and she was gone.

The ghost of a dead person must divide into many ghosts—to begin with. It is labor-intensive—to begin with. Because there are many bedrooms to visit, many sleepers to stand over.

Some sleepers—maybe just two or three—the dead will never leave.

Tuesdays I’m working the midnights. So Tuesdays I generally put in an afternoon at the Leadbetter. Attired in a taupe pants suit, I sit in my own office eighteen floors above where Wilmot deadends into Grainge. I am part-time security consultant here and I will go half-time or better when my EoD finally gets to be the mandatory twenty-five behind me. That date—my Entrance on Duty—is September 7, 1974. Retirement is already sniffing me up to see if I’m ripe.

The front desk called to say I had a visitor: Colonel Rockwell. Frankly, I was surprised that he was up and around. My understanding was that the boys were down from Chicago and the phone was off the hook. The Rockwells were digging in.

I put aside the CSSS layout I’d been staring at and I did my face. Too, I buzzed Linda, asking her to greet the elevator and bring the Colonel right on in.

He entered.

“Hey, Colonel Tom.”

I stepped forward but he seemed to take a pass on the hug I was offering him and he kept his chin down as we slid off his coat. The head staying low when he sat in the leather chair. I went back of my desk and said, “How goes it with you, Colonel Tom? My dear.”

He shrugged. He exhaled slowly. He looked up.

And I saw what you seldom see in the grief-struck. Panic. A primitive panic, a low-IQ panic, in the eyes—it makes you consider the meaning of the word harebrained. And it made me panic. I thought: He’s in a nightmare and now I am too. What do I do if he starts screaming? Start screaming? Should everybody start screaming?

“How is Miriam?”

“Very quiet,” he said, after a while.

I waited. “Take your time, Colonel,” I said. I thought it might be a good idea to do something null and soothing, like maybe get to some bills. “Say as much as you want or as little as you want.”

Tom Rockwell was Squad Supervisor during much of my time in Homicide. That was before he climbed into his personal express elevator and pushed the button marked Penthouse. In the space of ten years he made lieutenant as Shift Commander, then captain in charge of Crimes Against Persons, then full colonel as head of CID. He’s brass now: He isn’t a police, he’s a politician, juggling stats and budgets and PR. He could make Dep Comm for Operations. Christ, he could make Mayor. “It’s all head-doctoring and kissing ass,” he once said to me. “You know what I am? I’m not a cop. I’m a communicator.” But now Colonel Tom, the communicator, just sat there, very quietly.

“Mike. There’s something went on here.”

Again I waited.

“Something’s wrong.”

“I feel that too,” I said.

The diplomatic response—but his eyes leveled in.

“What’s your read on it, Mike? Not as a friend. As a police.”

“As a police? As a police I have to say that it looks like a suicide, Colonel Tom. But it could have been an accident. There was the rag there, and the 303. You think maybe she was cleaning it and...”

He flinched. And of course I understood. Yeah. What was she doing with the .22 in her mouth? Maybe tasting it. Tasting death. And then she—

“It’s Trader,” he said. “It has to be Trader.”

Well, this demanded some time to settle. Okay. Now: It is sometimes true that an apparent suicide will, on inspection, come back a homicide. But that inspection takes about two seconds. It is ten o’clock on a Saturday night, in Destry or Oxville. Some jig has just blown his chick to bits with a shotgun. But a couple of spikes later he hatches a brilliant scheme: He’ll make it look like she did it. So he gives the weapon a wipe and props her up on the bed or wherever. He might even muster the initiative to scrawl out a note, in his own fair hand. We used to have one of these notes tacked to the squadroom noticeboard. It read: “Good By Crule Whirld.” Well this is some sad shit, Marvis, you say when you get there, responding to Marvis’s call. What happened? And Marvis says, She was depress. Discreetly, Marvis leaves the room. He’s done his bit. What more can a man do? Now it’s our turn. You glance at the corpse: There’s no burn or shell wadding in the wound and the blood spatter is on the wrong pillow. And the wrong wall. You follow Marvis into the kitchen and he’s standing there with a glassine bag in one hand and a hot spoon in the other. Homicide. Heroin. Nice, Marvis. Come on. Downtown. Because you’re a murdering piece of shit. And a degenerate motherfucker. That’s why. A homicide come dressed to the ball as a suicide: This you expect from a braindead jackboy in the Seventy-Seven. But from Trader Faulkner, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at CSU? Please. The smart murder just never happens. That’s all bullshit. That’s all so...pathetic. The Professor did it. Oh, sure. Murder is dumb and then even dumber. Only two things will make you any good at it: Luck and practice. If you’re dealing with the reasonably young and healthy, and if the means is violent, then the homicide/suicide gray area is TV, is bullshit, is ketchup. Make no mistake, we would see it if it was there—because we want suicides to be homicides. We would infinitely prefer it. A made homicide means overtime, a clearance stat, and high fives in the squad-room. And a suicide is no damn use to anyone.