Night Train

  “He’s the least likely guy. So it has to be him. Come on, we can cook this shit up. All you need is a little irre­sponsibility. It’s like redecorating the bedroom—you can do it a hundred ways. Miriam did it. Bax Denziger did it. You did it. But let’s stick with Tom. Tom did it. He waits till I leave. Then he sneaks in and does it.”

  “Okay. Then why doesn’t he let it sleep? Why’d he crank me up? What am I doing sitting here tonight?”

  “That’s a blind. That’s just a diversion. So the truth would never occur to anyone sane.”

  “Motive?”

  “Easy. I got it. Jennifer recalled a terrible secret from her past. A memory she tried to suppress. With drugs.”

  “With drugs?”

  “When she was just a little girl, she asked her daddy...why he came to her bedroom. Why he made her do those bad things. Why he...Oh no. Oh. I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “That’s okay. But let’s stop this. Jennifer did it.”

  “Jennifer did it. See? Why doesn’t everyone just keep their mouth shut. Why doesn’t everyone...just shut the fuck up.”

  Then a revelation:

  Did you talk to Professor Denziger?

  Yeah I talked to Bax. He told you what—

  Yeah, he did. He agonized good about that. I thought it was kind of typical of her in a way. Not the incompetence. That wasn’t typical. But how she did it. Changing the values. Changing all the givens. Why’s that?

  Like if you said to her, I don’t know, who’s going to win the election in November, she had trouble get­ting interested. Because of the givens. The parameters. Not just the candidates—the whole thing. For her the thread had gotten lost so long ago.

  Did Denziger tell you that what she did looked deliberate?

  I think the only way you can genuinely go wrong there is when you have an ax to grind. Like when Sandage started wowing everyone with his quasar dis­coveries. His results were contaminated by brown dwarves, which quasars can resemble. It’s like in ten­nis: You want the ball to be good so much you actually see it good when it’s not. Jennifer wouldn’t see anything that wasn’t there. I think it was just part of the pattern. You said she wasn’t the pattern type. But that’s what mental illness does—it ropes you into a pattern. Some very corny stuff. There’s some­thing else she did too. She started buying things. What? Don’t tell me. Cars. Pianos. No, paintings. Real crap, too. She wasn’t particu­larly visual, and I’m not either. But they look like airport art to me. I keep turning deliveries away. The galleries don’t holler. It’s a suicide. They’ve seen this before.

  She used post-dated checks... Yeah. Post-dated checks. There were two deliv­eries on Friday. The checks were dated April first. April Fool. April Fool.

  Then another revelation:

  He’d just bummed a smoke off me: His first of the evening. I was halfway through my second pack. I said,

  “This might surprise you, but I don’t think so. From the autopsy. Toxicology? I get the feeling Tom’s told you about it.”

  “Miriam told me about it. She tells me everything in the end. The lithium? I played dumb. But I already knew.”

  “You knew Jennifer was on lithium?”

  “Not while she was alive I didn’t.” He sighed and said, “Mike, tell me something. That book... Making Sense of Suicide doesn’t make sense of suicide, or any­thing else. But it’s extra vague on suicide notes. How many suicides leave suicide notes?”

  That’s a very slippery stat, and I told him so.

  “And what’s the difference? What does it mean?”

  Nothing in itself, I said. Depends on the person, depends on the note. Some offer comfort. Others, blame.

  “She left a note. She left a note. She sent me a note by U.S. Mail. I went back to the office a week later and it was there in my tray. Here, help yourself. Now

  I’m going to do what she did on Saturday morning, when she posted it. I’m going to take a walk around the block.”

  I waited till I heard the door. I huddled down over the tape recorder. I tried to raise my voice above a whis­per—and I couldn’t. I had to use the volume control on the machine, because mine just wasn’t working.

  “My darling,” I whispered. “You’re back at work now and that consoles me. That, and the fact that you’re the kindest lover on the planet and will eventu­ally have to forgive me for what I’ve done.

  “You knew me ten times better than anyone, but I wasn’t quite what you thought I was. Almost exactly a year ago I started getting the sense that I was losing control of my thoughts. That’s the only way I can put it. My thoughts went about their thought thing, doing what they had to do, while I was just an innocent bystander. I didn’t dare go through Tulkinghorn, because I couldn’t trust him not to run to Dad. I thought I could fix it myself—which might have been part of the internal liar dice. I read up on it. And when you thought I was at the Brogan on Mondays I was at Rainbow Plaza where all the GCG people take their lunchbreaks on the lawn. You never scored a dime-bag so easy. Since last May I’ve been on varying doses of a stabilizer. Serzone, depecote, tegretol—they sound like moral stances. They dry your head out. But they stopped helping.

  “I’m frightened. I keep thinking I’m going to do something that nobody’s ever done before—something altogether inhuman. Is that what I’m doing now? Baby, I’m staying with you until tomorrow night. You were perfect for me. And remember that you couldn’t have done anything any different.

  “Help Ma. Help Dad. Help Dad. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry...”

  And so it went on, over the page to the end of the sheet: I’m sorry.

  Some time later I was in the kitchen again, drinking soda again. Watching the man move around again. Not just the cold air had pushed the blood into his cheeks. His movements, now, were sharper and nois­ier, tinnier. And his breath sounded raw. I changed the tape. I smoked. Feeding the thing inside of me. The thing inside of me—it wasn’t any calmer. It too was sharper, noisier—colder, angrier.

  He said over his shoulder: “Mike, don’t you have symptoms when you’re on that shit? Physical symp­toms?”

  “Yeah, you can do,” I said.

  “Doesn’t your face swell up and your hair fall out?” “It can do, yeah. Suddenly you’re Kojak.” “Mike, you’ll believe me when I say...My faith in my powers of observation have—has seen better days. I lived with a mood-drugged suicide for a year without noticing. Maybe I wouldn’t even have noticed that I was living with Kojak. But I’d have noticed that I was fucking him, wouldn’t I? Reassure me.”

  “Some people don’t get any physical symptoms. Not double vision. Not even the breath. Jennifer. Jen­nifer was very lucky with her body.”

  “A pity about that. A pity about that.”

  Her shine is leaving these rooms. Jennifer’s will to order is leaving these rooms. Slow male entropy is beginning—but for the time being nothing else has changed. Her blue trunk still occupies its place beneath the window. Her bureau lies open in its ante-mortem busyness. The bowl of potpourri goes on aging between the lamp and the framed photograph on the table we’re sitting at.

  “Jesus,” I said, smiling, “what was she on? Magic mushrooms?”

  Trader leaned forward. “Jennifer?”

  Graduation: In the photograph the three girls are standing—no, bending—in their robes and flat hats. Jennifer is laughing with her mouth about as wide as a mouth can go. Her eyes are moist seams. The two friends don’t appear to be in much better shape. But there is the fourth girl in the photograph, trapped in the corner of the frame, and she seems immune to this laughter—immune, maybe, to any laughter at all.

  “No,” he said. “Jennifer? No. See, this is where it stops adding up for me.”

  He paused—and then came the frown or the shadow.

  “What does?” I said. “What stops?”

  “She hated anything mood-altering—for herself. I mean, she did the usual shit at
college like everybody else. But then she quit and that was that. You know Jennifer. One glass of wine, but never two. She had a thing about it. The whole first year I met her, she had this crazy housemate who was—”

  “Phyllida,” I said. And saw that shadow again.

  “Phyllida. She was taking zinc and manganese and steel and chrome. And Jennifer said, ‘She’s eating a Sherman tank every day. What do you expect? She isn’t anyone now.’ I mean, I like to drink some nights and I like to smoke a little weed, and Jennifer never had a problem with that. But for herself? No sleeping pills, nothing. Even an aspirin was a last resort.”

  “She keep up with this Phyllida?”

  “No, thank God. A few letters. She got farmed out to her stepmother. And they moved to Canada. That was a buzz.”

  After a time I said, “You mind if I ask you a per­sonal question?”

  “Come on, Mike. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  How was your sex life?

  Good, thanks.

  I mean in the last year. You didn’t feel that it was dropping off a little?

  Maybe. It might have dropped off a little, I guess.

  Because that’s almost always a sign. So how often were you making love?

  Oh, I don’t know. I suppose in the last year it was down to once or twice a day.

  A day? You don’t mean once or twice a week?

  Once or twice a day. But more at the weekend.

  And who would initiate?

  Huh?

  Was it always your idea? Listen. Tell me to fuck off and everything, but some women, when they’re that good-looking, it’s like honey from the icebox. It won’t spread. What was she like in the sack?

  ...Adorable. Relax. I’m feeling good telling you this. It’s funny. That letter you saw is about the only one she ever sent me that’s halfway printable. She used to say, “Do you think anyone would believe how much of our time we spend doing this? Two rational adults?” When we went south on vacation, we’d come back and everyone would ask us why we didn’t have a tan.

  So sex was a big part of it.

  It didn’t come in parts.

  ...You never sensed any restlessness in her? I mean, she hooked up with you pretty early. You don’t think she might have felt she’d missed out?

  Well, what the fuck do I know. Listen, Mike, what can I tell you. Let me say how it was with us. We never really wanted to be with anybody else. It was kind of worrying. We had friends, we had brothers, and we saw a lot of Tom and Miriam, and we went to parties and hung with our crowd. But we never liked that as much as we liked being with each other. We spent our time talking, laughing, fucking and working. Our idea of a night out was a night in. Are you telling me peo­ple don’t want that? We kept expecting it to quieten down but it never did. I didn’t own her. I wasn’t secure in her a hundred percent—because once you are, the best is over. I knew there was a part of her I couldn’t see. A part she kept for herself. But it was a part of her intellect. It wasn’t some fucking mood. And I think she felt the same about me. We felt the same about each other. Isn’t that what we’re all meant to want?

  I was a long time leaving. Already I had my bag on my lap when I said,

  “The letter. You have that in your wallet when I yanked you downtown?” He nodded. I said, “That might have taken some of the wind out of my sails.”

  “Mike, you didn’t have any wind in your sails. You just thought you did.”

  “I had Colonel Tom, is what I had. It might have speeded things up.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want things speeded up. I wanted them slowed down.”

  “On March fourth. You said she seemed cheerful. All day. ‘Typically cheerful.’ “

  “That’s right. Ah but see, Jennifer thought you had a moral duty to be cheerful. Not to seem cheerful. To be cheerful.”

  “And you, dear? You said that, as you were leav­ing, you felt ‘distressed.’ Why ‘distressed’?”

  His face was blank. But then a look of hilarious humiliation moved quickly across it. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on his hand.

  “Another time.” And he stood up, saying, “Let’s do ‘distressed’ another time.”

  We were in the hall and he was helping me on with my jacket. And he touched me. He lifted the hair out from under my collar, and smoothed his hand across my spine. I felt confusion. I turned and said,

  “When people do this... When people do what she did, there’s a thing that makes it different. They end it, they get out. It’s over for them. But they kind of flip it over to you.”

  He considered me closely for a second. He said, “No, I haven’t found that.”

  “You okay, honey?”

  I gave him my softest look. But I was daunted, I think. Could I honestly say that Jennifer was an act I could even take his mind off, let alone follow? And if you aren’t digging yourself, at such moments, then nobody else is going to dig you. And maybe my look wasn’t so soft. Maybe, now, my softest look just isn’t so soft.

  “Yeah. You okay, Mike? This place,” he said, and he glanced around vaguely. “I realize... Have you ever lived with somebody who was physically beautiful? Physically.”

  “No,” I said, without having to think. Without hav­ing to think of Deniss, of Duwain, of Shawn, of Jon.

  “I realize now what an incredible luxury that was. This place—I guess this place is still pretty nice. But now it feels like a flop to me. Like a dump. Cold-water. Walk-up.”

  All I came home withy then, was Making Sense of Sui­cide.

  And in its pages, against all expectation (it is, as Trader said, lousily written, as well as smug and sanc­timonious and seriously out-of-date), I would find what I needed to know.

  The trail was cold, the trail was at absolute zero. But then I shivered—the way you do when you finally start to get warm.

  NOW THERE’S NOTHING

  I got back to the apartment around midnight.

  In the bedroom I stood over Tobe for the longest time. What he goes through with his body. It’s all he can do just to sit there on a summer evening, watching a game show, with a beer can sweating into his hand. Even in sleep he suffers. Like a mountain is always in pain. The slipping discs of its tectonic plates. The gris­tle caught between crust and mantle.

  When I quit working murders and had nothing much before me all day except the slow work of keep­ing dry, I used to stay up until the night train came— whenever. And then the long sleep. Until the night train came. Causing panic among the crockery. Shak­ing the ground beneath my feet.

  And that’s what I intend to do now. Until whenever.

  -+=*=+-

  My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.

  I did go. And I did straighten out the killing in the Ninety-Nine.

  It was a totally God-awful murder—I mean, for hunger—but it was the kind of case that homicide cops have sex dreams about: Basically, a newsworthy piece of shit with frills. Basically, a politically urgent, headline-hogging dunker. Quickly solved by concen­tration and instinct.

  The body of a fifteen-month-old baby boy had been found in a picnic cooler in a public recreation facility in the Ninety-Nine, over to Oxville. A precinct canvass had brought investigators to a rowhouse on the 1200 block of McLellan. By the time I showed there was a cordoned crowd of maybe a thousand people lin­ing the street, a gridlock of media trucks, and, up above, a Vietnam of geostationary network helicopters.

  Inside, five detectives, two squad supervisors and the Dep Comm were wondering how to get this show downtown without a prime-time riot. Meanwhile they were questioning a twenty-eight-year-old female, LaDonna, and her boyfriend, DeLeon. A decade ago, a month ago, in recounting this, I would have said that she was a PR and he was a Jake. Which is true. But suffice it to say that they were people of color. Also present, sitting on kitchen chairs and swinging their white-socked feet, were two silent little girls of thirteen and fourteen, Sophie and Nancy—LaDonna’s kid sisters. LaDonna also maintained that it
was her baby and her Igloo.

  It’s kind of an average Oxville scenario: The fam­ily is enjoying a picnic (this is January), the toddler wanders off (wearing only a diaper), they start search­ing for him (in this open field), and are unsuccessful (and go home). Forgetting the Igloo. According to LaDonna, the explanation stares you in the face. The toddler eventually returned and climbed into the pic­nic cooler and pulled the lid down (engaging the exter­nal catch) and suffocated. Whereas the ME’s initial finding, soon to be confirmed by autopsy, is that the child died of strangulation. According to DeLeon, things are a little more complicated. As they were leav­ing the recreational facility, their search abandoned, they saw a gang of white skinheads—known nazis and drugdealers—climb out of a truck and head for that part of the open field where the child was last seen.

  We’re all sitting there, listening to these two brain surgeons, but I’m watching the girls. I’m watching Sophie and Nancy. And the whole thing went trans­parent. This was all it took: From the adjoining bed­room came the sound of a baby’s cry. A baby waking, dirty or hungry or lonely. LaDonna kept talking—she never skipped a beat—but Sophie rose an inch from her seat for a second, and Nancy’s face suddenly swelled with hatred. Immediately I saw:

  LaDonna was not the mother of the murdered boy. She was his grandmother.

  Sophie and Nancy were not LaDonna’s kid sisters. They were her daughters.

  Sophie was the mother of the waking baby in the bedroom. Nancy was the mother of the baby in the Igloo.

  Sophie was the murderess.

  It was down. We even got a motive: Earlier the same day, Nancy had taken Sophie’s last diaper.

  I was on the six o’clock news that night, nation­wide.

  “This murder was not about race,” I reassured 150 million viewers. “This murder was not about drugs.” Everyone can relax. “This murder was about a diaper.”

  There are three things I didn’t tell Trader Faulkner.

  I didn’t tell Trader that, in my view, Jennifer’s let­ter was not the work of a woman under terminal stress. I’ve seen a hundred suicide notes. They have things in common. They express insecurity—and they are barren, arid. “Serzone, depecote, tegretol—they sound like moral stances.” Toward the finish of the lives of suicides, more or less all their thoughts are self-lacerating. Whether they soothe or snarl, cringe or strut, suicide notes do not seek to entertain.