I looked up from my notes. Something shifted in Tulkinghorn’s focus. He contemplated me. I was no longer his interrogator. I was Detective Mike Hooli-
han, whom he knew: A police and an alcoholic. And a patient. His washed eyes now regarded me with approval, but a cold approval, one that gave no lift to the spirit. To his or to mine.
“You’ve kept yourself in shape, Detective.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No recurrences of that nonsense.”
“None.”
“Good. You’ve seen just about everything too, haven’t you?”
“Just about. Yes, sir, I believe I have.”
When I got back home I dug out the list I’d compiled on my return from the funeral. Briskly, boldly, this list is headed, Stressors and Precipitants. But what follows now seems vague as rain:
1. Significant Other? Trader. Things he didn’t see?
2. Money?
3. Job?
4. Physical Health?
5. Mental Health? Nature of disorder: a. psychological? b. ideational/organic? c. metaphysical?
6. Deep Secret? Trauma? Childhood?
7. Other Significant Other?
Now I cross out 4. Which leaves me wondering what I mean by 5 c). And thinking about 7. Is Mr. Seven her lithium connect?
A SENSE OF AN ENDING
Death scenes are as delicate as orchids. Like death chemistry itself, they seem committed to the business of deterioration and decay. But my death scene has eternal youth. It still has the sash on the door. Do Not Cross. I cross.
The blood on the bedroom wall looks black now, with just the faintest undercoat of rust. At the top of the splatter, near the ceiling, the smallest drops gather like tadpoles, their tails pointing away from the site of the wound. A rectangular section of the wall has been removed by the science team, right in the middle of the base smear, where the bullet hole was. Then the downward swipe from the wedged towel.
I think of Trader, and find that I am contemplating the scene as largely an interior-decoration problem. I want to get out the mop and make a start on it myself. When he returns, will he be able to sleep in this room? How many licks of paint will he want? Surprisingly, I think I am finding a friend in Trader Faulkner. Barely a week after I tried my level best to flake him into the lethal injection, I am finding a friend in Trader Faulkner. I talked with him at the wake at the Rock-wells’. It is his key I hold in my hand. He has told me where to look for everything.
Jennifer kept all her personal papers in a locked blue trunk in the living area, and I have a key for that too. But first I quickly cover the apartment from room to room, just to get a feel: Post-its on the mirror above the telephone, magnetic Scrabble pieces on the fridge door (saying milk and filters), a bathroom cabinet containing cosmetics and shampoos and a few patented medicines. In the bedroom closet her sweaters are stacked in plastic covers. Her underwear drawer is a galaxy—star-bright…
It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don’t think that’s true—unless it isn’t true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It’s a mess in there.
But I look around now and what I’m seeing is settled order. Tobe and myself are both slobs, and when a pair of slobs shack up together you don’t get slob times two—you get slob squared. You get slob cubed. And this place, to me, feels like a masterpiece of system: Grooved, yet unemphatic, with nothing rigid in it. Homes of the self-slaughtered have a sullen and defeated aspect. The abandoned belongings seem to say: Weren’t we good enough for you? Weren’t we any good? But Jennifer’s apartment looks as though it is expecting its mistress to return—to fly in through the door. And against all expectation I start to be happy.