So I did live alone. I didn’t live with Deniss.
Is that Tobe now, starting up the stairs? Or is it the first rumor of the night train? The building always seems to hear it coming, the night train, and braces itself as soon as it hears in the distance that desperate cry.
I don’t live alone. I don’t live alone. I live with Tobe.
March 9
Just come back from my meet with Silvera.
The first thing he said to me was: “I hate this.”
I said you hate what?
He said the whole damn thing.
I said Colonel Tom thinks it plays to homicide.
He said what does?
I said the three shots.
He said Rockwell never was any good. On the streets.
I said he got shot in the line for Christ’s sake. He got shot in the fucking line.
Silvera paused.
“When was the last time you took one for the state?” I asked him.
Silvera went on pausing. But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t thinking of the time, way back in company lore, that Tom Rockwell stopped one in the Southern, as a beat cop, while flushing hoodies from a drug corner. No, Silvera was just contemplating his own career curve.
I lit a cigarette and said, “Colonel Tom has it playing to homicide.”
He lit a cigarette and said, “Because that’s all he’s got. You shoot yourself once in the mouth. That’s life. You shoot yourself twice. Hey. Accidents happen. You shoot yourself three times. You got to really want to go.”
We were in Hosni’s, the little gyro joint on Grainge. Popular among police for its excellent smoking section. Hosni himself isn’t a smoker. He’s a libertarian. He threw out half his tables just to skirt city law. I’m not proud of my habit, and I know that Hosni’s crusade is one we’re eventually going to lose. But all cops smoke their asses off and I figure it’s part of what we give to the state—our lungs, our hearts.
Silvera said, “And this was a .22. A revolver.”
“Yeah. Not a zip. Or a faggot gun. You know like a derringer or something. The old lady upstairs. She said she heard one shot?”
“Or she’s woken by one shot and then hears the second or the third. She’s blacked out on sherry in front of the TV. What does she know.”
“I’ll go talk to her.”
“This case is so fucking cute,” said Silvera. “When Paulie No fluoroscoped her, suddenly we’re looking at three bullets. One’s still in her head, right? One’s in Evidence Control: The one we dug out of the wall at the scene. After the autopsy we go back. There’s only one hole in the wall. We dig out another round. Two bullets. One hole.”
In itself this was no big deal. Police are pretty blase about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and “the magic bullet”? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn’t be there.
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?”