Without thinking about it I found I had brought along my notebook, my flashlight, my rubber gloves, and my .38 snub.
In police work you soon get to be familiar with what we call the “yeah, right” suicide. Where you go in the door, see the body, look around the room, and say, “Yeah, right.” This was definitely not a yeah-right suicide. I have known Jennifer Rockwell since she was eight years old. She was a favorite of mine. But she was also a favorite of everybody else’s. And I watched her grow into a kind of embarrassment of perfection.
Brilliant, beautiful. Yeah, I’m thinking: To-die-for brilliant. Drop-dead beautiful. And not intimidating—or only as intimidating as the brilliant-beautiful can’t help being, no matter how accessible they seem. She had it all and she had it all, and then she had some more. Her dad’s a cop. Her considerably older brothers are cops—both with Chicago PD, Area Six. Jennifer was not a cop. She was an astrophysicist, here at Mount Lee. Guys? She combed them out of her hair, and played the field at CSU. But for the last—Christ, I don’t know—seven or eight years, it must be, she was shacked up with another bigbrain and dreamboat: Trader. Professor Trader Faulkner. This was definitely not a yeah-right suicide. This was a no-wrong suicide.
Johnny Mac and myself pulled up in the unmarked. Whitman Avenue. Detached and semidetached residences on a wide tree-lined street: An academic dormitory on the edge of the Twenty-Seven. I climbed out in my stretch pants and my low pumps.
So the radio cars and the beat cops were there, and the science crew and the medical examiners were there, and Tony Silvera and Oltan O’Boye were there— inside. And some neighbors. But them you look right through. These uniformed figures were churning under the dome lights. And I knew they swayed to sudden priorities. It was like in the Southern when you keyed the mike and said there was an officer down. Down, in some cases, meaning fucked up forever, in a cross-alley after a chase, on a warehouse floor, or reeling alone around a vanished drug corner with both his hands over his eyes. When somebody close to the murder police starts Grafting overtime for the murder police, then special rules apply. This is racial. This is an attack on every last one of us.
I badged my way through the tunnel of uniforms around the front door, making the landlady as my best witness or last-to-see. There was a fat full moon reflecting the sun on to my back. Not even Italian police are sentimental about full moons. You’re looking at a workload increase of twenty-five to thirty-five percent. A full moon on a Friday night and you’re talking a two-hour backup in the emergency room and long lines trailing in and out of Trauma.
At the door to Jennifer’s apartment I was met by Silvera. Silvera. He and myself have worked many cases. We have stood together, like this, in many a stricken home. But not quite like this.
“Jesus, Mike.”
“Where is she?”
“Bedroom.”
“You through? Wait, don’t tell me. I’m going in.”
The bedroom led off the living room. And I knew where to go. Because I had been to this residence before, maybe a dozen times in half as many years—to drop something off for Colonel Tom, to give Jennifer a ride to a ballgame or a beach party or a function at the Dep Comm’s. Her, and once or twice Trader, too. It was like that, a functional kind of friendship, but with good chats in the car. And as I crossed the living room and leaned on the bedroom door I flashed a memory of a couple of summers back, a party Overmars threw after his new deck was done, when I caught Jennifer’s eye as she was smiling up from the glass of white wine she’d been nursing all night. (Everyone else apart from me, of course, was completely swacked.) I thought then that here was somebody who had a real talent for happiness. A lot of gratitude in her. I’d need a megaton of scotch to make me burn like that but she looked lovestruck on half a glass of white.