“Yeah,” I said, and my head dropped. I’m tough enough. And getting less proud of it every hour.
She turned again toward the waiting figure of her husband, and slowly nodded. Before she moved to join him, and before I followed with my head still down, Miriam said,
“Who the hell was she, Mike?”
I think we all have this image in our heads now, and the sounds. We have these frames of film. Tom and
Miriam have them. I have them. In the small interrogation room I watched them form on the other side of Trader’s eyes—these frames of film that show the death of Jennifer Rockwell.
You wouldn’t see her. You’d see the wall behind her head. Then the first detonation, and its awful flower. Then a beat, then a moan and a shudder. Then the second shot. Then a beat, a gulp, a sigh. Then the third.
You wouldn’t see her.
Part Two
f e l o d e s e
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOPSY
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It’s the night train.
Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I don’t want to see.
Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner.
I’ve got to slow this shit down. I’ve got to slow it all down.
What I’m doing here, with my ballpoint, my tape recorder, and my PC—it’s the same as what Paulie No was doing in the ME’s office, with his clamp, his electric saw, his trayfull of knives. Only we call it the psychological autopsy.
I can do this. I am trained to do this.
Recall:
For a time, though only a short time, and only once to my face, they used to call me “Suicide Mike.” This was thought to be too offensive, even for downtown, and they soon abandoned it. Offensive not to the poor bastards found slumped in carseats in sealed garages, or half submerged in crimson bathtubs. Offensive to me: It meant I was fool enough to take any bum call. Because a suicide didn’t do a damn thing for your solve rate or your overtime. On the midnights the phone would ring and Mac or O’Boye would be pouting over the cupped receiver and saying, How about you handle this one, Mike? It’s an s.d. and I need dough for my mother’s operation. A suspicious death— not the murder he craves. For little-boy-lost here also believes that suicides are an insult to his forensic gifts. He wants a regular perpetrator. Not some schmuck who, a century ago, would have been buried at the four-corners, under a heap of rocks, with a stake through his heart. Then for a time—a short time, as I say—they’d hold out the phone and deadpan, It’s for you, Mike. It’s a suicide. And then I’d yell at them. But they weren’t wrong, maybe. Maybe it moved and compelled me more than it did them, to crouch under the bridge on the riverbank, to stand in a rowhouse stairwell while a shadow rotated slowly on the wall, and think about those who hate their own lives and choose to defy the terrible providence of God.
As part of my job I completed, as many others did, the course called “Suicide: Harsh Conclusions,” at Pete, and followed that up, again on city time, with the refresher lecture series on “Patterns of Suicide,” at CC.
I came to know the graphs and diagrams of suicide, their pie segments, their concentric circles, their color codes, their arrows, their snakes and ladders. With my Suicide Prevention tours, back in the Forty-Four, plus the hundred-some suicides I worked in the Show, I came to know not just the physical aftermaths but the basic suicide picture, ante mortem.
And Jennifer doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t belong.
I have my folders out on the couch, this Sunday morning. Going through my notes to see what I got: