Martin Amis - Night Train

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?

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.”