I was a long time leaving. Already I had my bag on my lap when I said,
“The letter. You have that in your wallet when I yanked you downtown?” He nodded. I said, “That might have taken some of the wind out of my sails.”
“Mike, you didn’t have any wind in your sails. You just thought you did.”
“I had Colonel Tom, is what I had. It might have speeded things up.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want things speeded up. I wanted them slowed down.”
“On March fourth. You said she seemed cheerful. All day. ‘Typically cheerful.’ “
“That’s right. Ah but see, Jennifer thought you had a moral duty to be cheerful. Not to seem cheerful. To be cheerful.”
“And you, dear? You said that, as you were leaving, you felt ‘distressed.’ Why ‘distressed’?”
His face was blank. But then a look of hilarious humiliation moved quickly across it. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on his hand.
“Another time.” And he stood up, saying, “Let’s do ‘distressed’ another time.”
We were in the hall and he was helping me on with my jacket. And he touched me. He lifted the hair out from under my collar, and smoothed his hand across my spine. I felt confusion. I turned and said,
“When people do this… When people do what she did, there’s a thing that makes it different. They end it, they get out. It’s over for them. But they kind of flip it over to you.”
He considered me closely for a second. He said, “No, I haven’t found that.”
“You okay, honey?”
I gave him my softest look. But I was daunted, I think. Could I honestly say that Jennifer was an act I could even take his mind off, let alone follow? And if you aren’t digging yourself, at such moments, then nobody else is going to dig you. And maybe my look wasn’t so soft. Maybe, now, my softest look just isn’t so soft.
“Yeah. You okay, Mike? This place,” he said, and he glanced around vaguely. “I realize… Have you ever lived with somebody who was physically beautiful? Physically.”
“No,” I said, without having to think. Without having to think of Deniss, of Duwain, of Shawn, of Jon.
“I realize now what an incredible luxury that was. This place—I guess this place is still pretty nice. But now it feels like a flop to me. Like a dump. Cold-water. Walk-up.”
All I came home withy then, was Making Sense of Suicide.
And in its pages, against all expectation (it is, as Trader said, lousily written, as well as smug and sanctimonious and seriously out-of-date), I would find what I needed to know.
The trail was cold, the trail was at absolute zero. But then I shivered—the way you do when you finally start to get warm.
NOW THERE’S NOTHING
I got back to the apartment around midnight.
In the bedroom I stood over Tobe for the longest time. What he goes through with his body. It’s all he can do just to sit there on a summer evening, watching a game show, with a beer can sweating into his hand. Even in sleep he suffers. Like a mountain is always in pain. The slipping discs of its tectonic plates. The gristle caught between crust and mantle.
When I quit working murders and had nothing much before me all day except the slow work of keeping dry, I used to stay up until the night train came— whenever. And then the long sleep. Until the night train came. Causing panic among the crockery. Shaking the ground beneath my feet.
And that’s what I intend to do now. Until whenever.
-+=*=+-
My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.
I did go. And I did straighten out the killing in the Ninety-Nine.
It was a totally God-awful murder—I mean, for hunger—but it was the kind of case that homicide cops have sex dreams about: Basically, a newsworthy piece of shit with frills. Basically, a politically urgent, headline-hogging dunker. Quickly solved by concentration and instinct.
The body of a fifteen-month-old baby boy had been found in a picnic cooler in a public recreation facility in the Ninety-Nine, over to Oxville. A precinct canvass had brought investigators to a rowhouse on the 1200 block of McLellan. By the time I showed there was a cordoned crowd of maybe a thousand people lining the street, a gridlock of media trucks, and, up above, a Vietnam of geostationary network helicopters.