I went in and closed the door behind me.
This is how you do it. You kind of wheel around slowly into the scene. Periphery first. Body last. I mean, I knew where she was. My radar went to the bed but she had done it on a chair. In the corner, to my right. Otherwise: Curtains half-drawn against the moonlight, orderly dressing table, tousled sheets, and a faint smell of lust. At her feet, an old black-stained pillowcase and a squirt can of 303.
I have said that I am used to being around dead bodies. But I took a full hot flush when I saw Jennifer Rockwell, glazed naked on the chair, her mouth open, her eyes still moist, wearing an expression of childish surprise. The surprise light not heavy, as if she had come across something she’d lost and no longer expected to find. And not quite naked. Oh my. She’d done it with a towel turbaned around her head, like you do to dry your hair. But now of course the towel was wet through and solid red and looked as though it weighed more than any living woman could carry.
No, I didn’t touch her. I just made my notes and drew my stick-figure sketch, with professional care— like I was back in the rotation. The .22 lay upside down and almost on its side, propped against the chair leg. Before I left the room I turned off the light for a second with a gloved hand and there were her eyes still moist in the moonlight. Crime scenes you look at like cartoon puzzles in the newspapers. Spot the difference. And something was wrong. Jennifer’s body was beautiful—you wouldn’t dare pray for a body like that—but something was wrong with it. It was dead.
Silvera went in to bag the weapon. Then the crime-lab techs would get her prints and measure distances and take many photographs. And then the ME would come and roll her. And then pronounce her.
The jury is still out on women police. On whether they can take it. Or for how long. On the other hand, maybe it’s me: Maybe I’m just another fuckoff. New York PD, for instance, is now fifteen percent female. And all over the country women detectives continue to do outstanding work, celebrated work. But I’m thinking that these must be some very, very exceptional ladies. Many times, when I was in Homicide, I said to myself, Walk away, girl. Ain’t nobody stopping you. Just walk away. Murders are men’s work. Men commit them, men clean up after them, men solve them, men try them. Because men like violence. Women really don’t figure that much, except as victims, and among the bereaved, of course, and as witnesses. Ten or twelve years back, during the arms buildup toward the end of Reagan’s first term, when the nuclear thing was on everyone’s mind, it seemed to me that the ultimate homicide was coming and one day I’d get the dispatcher’s call alerting me to five billion dead: “All of them, except you and me.” In full consciousness and broad daylight men sat at desks drawing up contingency plans to murder everybody. I kept saying out loud: “Where are the women?” Where were the women? I’ll tell you: They were witnesses. Those straggly chicks in their tents on Green-ham Common, England, making the military crazy with their presence and their stares—they were witnesses. Naturally, the nuclear arrangement, the nuclear machine, was strictly men only. Murder is a man thing.
But if there’s one aspect of homicide work that women do about a thousand times better than men it’s riding a note. Women are good at that—at breaking the news. Men fuck it up because of the way they always handle emotion. They always have to act the n.o.d., so they come on like a preacher or a town crier, or all numb and hypnotized like someone reading off a list of commodity futures or bowling scores. Then halfway through it hits them what they’re doing and you can tell they’re close to losing it. I’ve seen beat cops burst out laughing in the face of some poor little schnook whose wife just walked under a Mack truck. At such moments, men realize that they’re impostors, and then anything can happen. Whereas I would say that women feel the true weight of the thing immediately and after that it’s a difficult event but not an unnatural one. Sometimes, of course, they crack up laughing—I mean the supposedly bereaved. You’re just getting into your my-sad-duty routine and they’re waking up the neighbors at three in the morning to pop a party.