Martin Amis - Night Train

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.

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?”

I nodded. And of course I was thinking, Jesus, this really is fucked up.

Eight days on and Jennifer Rockwell is still laid out like a banquet dish in the walk-in freezer on Battery and Jeff.

Time for Trader.

My first thought was this: I’d send Oltan O’Boye and maybe Keith Booker up to Trader’s department at CSU, in a black-and-white, and have them jerk him out of a seminar. Yeah, with lights but no sirens. Have them yank him out of the lecture hall or wherever, and bring him downtown. The hitch was we’d be up against probable cause way too early. And whatever Colonel Tom thought we had, we didn’t have probable cause.

So I just called his room on campus. At six a.m.

“Professor Faulkner? Detective Hoolihan. Homicide. I want you downtown today at Criminal Investigations. As soon as you humanly can.”

He said what for?

“I’ll send the wagon. You like me to send the wagon?”

He said what for?

And I just said I wanted to straighten something out.

In truth it’s perfect for me.

Around eight in the morning, and we’re three hours into a blizzard that has upped and hurled itself down from Alaska. You got hail, sleet, snow, and spume skimmed off from the ocean, plus faceslapping gouts of iced rain. Trader will be trudging along from the subway stop or clambering out of a cab down there on Whitney. He’ll look up, for shelter, at the Lubianka of CID. Where he will find a succession of drenched and dirty linoleum corridors, a slow-climbing, heavy-breathing elevator, and, in Homicide, a forty-four-year-old police with coarse blonde hair, bruiser’s tits and broad shoulders, and pale blue eyes in her head that have seen everything.

And Trader will find hardly anybody else. It’s Tuesday. In Homicide the zoo contains only a smattering of witnesses, suspects, malefactors and perpetrators. The weekend, which for us is just a code word meaning a regular bender of citywide crime, has come and gone. And there is also the bad weather: Bad weather is the big police. For company, while he waits in the zoo, Trader will have only the husband, the father and the pimp of a bludgeoned prostitute, and a Machine executioner (presently top of the money list) called Jackie Zee who has been asked downtown to elaborate on an alibi.

The phones are silent. The midnight shift is falling apart and the eight-to-four is limping in. Johnny Mac is reading an editorial in Penthouse. Keith Booker, big black motherfucker with scars and whole gold ingots on most of his teeth, is trying to watch a college ballgame from Florida on the faulty TV. O’Boye is painfully bent over his typewriter. These guys are kind of in on it. Only Silvera has the full picture, but these guys are kind of in on it. Trader Faulkner will be receiving no words of condolence from anybody here.

At 08:20 the Associate Professor checks in downstairs and is shunted up to the fourteenth. I watch him step out. In his right hand he is holding his briefcase, in his left the pink card issued him by building security at the front desk. The rim of his fedora, which has lost its definition in the rain, is starting to droop over his darkened face, and his overcoat gives off a faint vapor under the tube lighting. His gait is deliberate and kind of wide at the knees. His inturned shoes are squelching toward me.

He says, “It’s Mike, isn’t it. Good to see you again.”

And I say, “You’re late.”

Johnny Mac gives him a leer, and Detective Booker does a good job of chewing gum in his direction, as Trader is led into the zoo. I point to a chair. And walk away. If he likes, Trader can talk philosophy with Jackie Zee. A half-hour later I return. In response to a wag of my head Trader gets to his feet and I reescort him back past the elevators.