NIGHT TRAIN BY MARTIN AMIS

Silvera lit a cigarette and said, “Why would she want to put her cigarette out?”

Guy’s standing there, looking around for a sign. Big guy, fat, puzzled.

“See that booth behind the glass door,” said Sil­vera, “with all those old files heaped up in it?”

Guy turns and peers.

“That’s the no-smoking section. If what you’re interested in is having people put their cigarettes out, you might find more play in there.”

Guy slopes off. We’re sitting around, smoking, and drinking the cowboy coffee, and I said hey. In the old days. Did / ever throw a pass at you? Silvera thought about it. He said as far as he remembered, I just slapped him around a few times.

“March fourth,” I said. “It was O’Boye notified Trader, right?”

On the night of the death, Detective Oltan O’Boye drives out to CSU to inform Professor Trader Faulkner. The deal is, Trader and Jennifer cohabit, but every Sunday night he takes to his cot in his office on cam­pus. O’Boye is banging on his door around 23:15. Trader is already in pajamas, robe, slippers. Notified of his loss, he expresses hostile disbelief. There’s O’Boye, six feet two and three hundred pounds of raw meat and station-house dough fat in a polyester sport coat, with an alligator complexion and a Magnum on his hip. And there’s the Associate Professor, in his slip­pers, calling him a fucking liar and getting ready to swing his fists.

“O’Boye brought him downtown,” said Silvera. “Mike, I’ve seen some bad guys in my time, but this one’s a fucking beauty. His eyeglasses are as thick as the telescope at Mount Lee. And get this. He had leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. And there he sits on a bench in the corridor, bold as day, crying into his hands. Son of a bitch.”

I said he see the body?

He said yeah. They let him see her.

I said and?

He said he kind of leaned over it. Thought he was going to hold her but he didn’t.

I said he say anything?

He said he said Jennifer…Oh, Jennifer, what have you done?

“Detective Silvera?”

Hosni. And Overmars’s call. Silvera rose, and I started gathering our stuff. Then I gave him a minute before joining him by the phone.

“Okay,” I said. “How many three-in-the-heads we got?”

“It’s great. Seven in the last twenty years. No problem. We got a four-shot too.”

On our way to the door we took a glance at the no-smoking section. The guy was in there, alone, unat­tended, unserved, looking vigilant and strained.

“He’s like Colonel Tom,” said Silvera. “He’s in the wrong section. Oh and guess what. Five of them were women. It’s like we say. Men kill other people. It’s a guy thing. Women kill themselves. Suicide’s a babe thing, Mike.”

March 10

Saturday. In the morning, just for the hell of it, really, I do a half-block canvass on Whitman Avenue. It’s a nice neighborhood now. A middle-class enclave on the frontier of the Twenty-Seven: You got the old Univer­sity Library over on Volstead, and the Business School on York. American cities like to fix it so that their seats of learning are surrounded by war zones (this is real­ity, pal), and it used to be that way around here. Ten years ago, Volstead Street was like the Battle of Stalingrad. Now it’s all nailed up and scorched-looking— vacated or plain abandoned, with hardly a hoody in sight. It’s tough to say who made this happen. The economy did it.

So as I move from door to door, under the elms, the residents are very, very cooperative. It wasn’t like doing a rowhouse block in Oxville or a project in Destry. Nobody told me to go suck cocks in hell. But nobody saw anything either. Or heard anything, on March fourth.

Until my last call. Yeah. Wouldn’t you know. A lit­tle girl, too, in pink ribbons and bobby socks. Silvera’s right: This case is so fucking cute. But it’s not pure ketchup, because kids do notice things, with their new eyes. The rest of us just looking out there and seeing the same old shit.

I’m winding it up with the mom, who suddenly says, “Ask Sophie. Sophie! Sophie was out riding her new bike up and down the street. I don’t let her leave the street on it.” Sophie comes into the kitchen and I hunker down on her.

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