I ask about the shots. She says she was dozing (yeah, right), and the TV was on, and there were shots on the TV also. Some cop thing, naturally. She describes the report she heard for definite as unmistakably a gunshot, but no louder than a door being slammed two or three rooms away. You can feel the weight of the building: Constructed in an age of cheap materials. Mrs. Rolfe dialed 911 at 19:40. First officer showed at 19:55. Plenty of time, theoretically, for Trader to pack up and split. The little girl wheeled her bike in “around a quarter of eight,” according to her mother. Which puts Trader on the street—when? 19:30? 19:41?
“They fight ever?”
“Not to my knowledge, no,” says Mrs. Rolfe.
“How’d they seem to you?”
“Like the dream couple.”
But what kind of dream?
“It’s just so awful,” she says, making a move for the sauce. “It’s shaken me up, I admit.”
I used to be like that. Any bad news would do. Like your friend’s friend’s dog died.
“Mrs. Rolfe, did Jennifer seem depressed ever?”
“Jennifer? She was always cheerful. Always cheerful.”
Trader, Jennifer, Mrs. Rolfe: They were neighborly. Jennifer ran errands for her. If she needed something heavy shifted, Trader would move it. They kept a spare key for her. She kept a spare key for them. She still had that spare key, used to gain access on the night of March fourth. I say I’ll take that key, thank you, ma’am, and log it with Evidence Control. Left her my card, in case she needed anything. I could see myself looking in on her here, as I still do for several elderly parties in the Southern. I could see myself developing an obligation.
On the floor below: The door to Jennifer’s apartment is sashed with orange crime-scene tape. I slipped inside for a second. My first reaction, in the bedroom, was strictly police. I thought: What a beautiful crime scene. Totally undeteriorated. Not only the blood spatter on the wall but the sheets on the bed have the exact same pattern that I remember.
I sat on the chair with my .38 on my lap, trying to imagine. But I kept thinking about Jennifer the way she used to be. As gifted as she was, in body and mind, she never glassed herself off from you. If you ran into her, at a party, say, or downtown, she wouldn’t say hi and move on. She’d always be particular with you. She’d always leave you with something.
Jennifer would always leave you with something.
March 12
Today my shift was noon to eight. Sitting there smoking cigarettes and changing tapes, changing tapes — audio, visual, audiovisual. We’re casing the new hotel in Quantro, because we know the Outfit has money in it. I finally got the visual fix I was looking for: Two guys in the atrium, standing in the shadows back of the fountain. When we say the Outfit or the Mob, in this city, we don’t mean the Colombians or the Cubans, the Yakuza, the Jake posses, the El Ruks, the Crips and the Bloods. We mean Italians. So I watched these two greasers in blue suits that cost five grand, gesturing at each other, very formal. Men of honor, worthy of respect. Wise guys had long before stopped behaving that way, but then some movies came along that reminded them that their grandparents used to do that shit, with the honor, and so they started doing it, all over again.
Incidentally: We want that hotel.
I feel grateful for quiet workloads on days such as this, days of lethargy and faint but persistent nausea which have to do with my time of life, and my liver. More my liver than my unused womb. My only way around this is a transplant, a full organ transplant, which is possible, and expensive. But the precarious-ness—the risk of hepatic collapse—keeps me honest. If I bought a new liver, I’d just trash that one too.
Early afternoon Colonel Tom buzzed me and asked if I’d come up to his office on the twenty-third.
He is shrinking. His desk is big anyway but now it looks like an aircraft carrier. And his face like a little gun turret, with its two red panic buttons. He isn’t getting better.