Well at least he died in a good cause.
Right. He didn’t give it up lightly. And you know what else?
What?
He was doing it for all of us.
He had no thought for himself up there.
He was pushing out the boundaries for all of us.
Laying his life on the line for all of us.
Greater love hath no man.
Than him who.
Lays down his life.
For a better handjob.
Well put. For a better handjob.
With TV you expect everything to measure up. Things are meant to measure up. The punishment will answer the crime. The crime will fall within the psychological profile of the malefactor. The alibi will disintegrate. The gun will smoke. The veiled woman will suddenly appear in the courthouse.
Motive, motive. “Motive”: That which moves, that which impels. But with homicide, now, we don’t care about motive. We never give it a second’s thought. We don’t care about the why. We say: Fuck the why. Motive might have been worth considering, might have been pretty reliable, might have been in okay shape half a century ago. But now it’s all up in the fucking air. With the TV.
I’ll tell you who wants a why. Jurors want a why. They want reruns of Perry Mason and The Defenders. They want Car Fifty-Four, Where Are You?
They want commercials every ten minutes or it never happened.
That’s homicide. This is suicide. And we all want a why for suicide.
And how’s it looking?
Tomorrow night I’m seeing Trader Faulkner, and something new, something more, may emerge from that. ‘But otherwise it’s pretty much made. It’s down. Isn’t it? I have followed up all the names in Jennifer’s address book. I have been through the phone records and the credit-card accounts. And there’s only one gap: No hit on the lithium. Tony Silvera has been onto Adrian Drago in Narcotics, and they gave their snitches a roust. But this isn’t a street drug we’re talking about. And I don’t build on nailing the connect.
But—hey. Jennifer Rockwell was a cleavage in a lab coat. But she wasn’t Mary Poppins. A spinning top looks still and stable until the force starts to weaken. A tremor, then it slows and slews. It wobbles and reels and clatters. Then it stops.
Answers are coming together, are they not? We got sex and drugs and rock and roll. This is more than you usually get. This is plenty. This is practically TV.
So why don’t I buy it?
I keep thinking about her body. I keep thinking about Jennifer’s body and the confidence she had in it. See her in a swimsuit and you just thought… One summer day five or six years ago the Rockwells took the whole roof pool at the Trum, for their anniversary, and when Jennifer came out of the cabana and walked toward us in her white one-piece we all fell silent for a beat, and Silvera said, “Hm. Not bad.” Then Grandma Rebka clapped her hands together and wailed, “Zugts afen mir!” It should be said about me. We should all be so lucky. The sight of her instantly had you going along with the idea that the basis of attraction is genetic. Get Jennifer, and your genes would surge forth, in a limo. Her body was kind of an embarrassment, a thrilling embarrassment, to everyone (even Trader dipped his head). But it wasn’t an embarrassment to her. The confidence with which she carried it was self-evident, self-sufficient—I guess the word I want is “consummate.” She never needed to give it a moment’s thought. And when you consider how much the rest of us think about our bodies, and what kind of thoughts these are. Yes, absolutely right. We should all be so lucky.
Something else was said that day, around the roof pool at the Trum. The two grandmas, Rebka and Rhi-annon, who died within a month of each other the following year—they were a great double act. As a ten-year-old Rebka had cleaned the streets of Vienna with her father’s skullcap. And she was an angel of light. Silver-spoon Rhiannon, on the other hand, was dour, sarcastic, and mean. And Welsh. If you thought Schadenfreude was a German word, then five minutes with Rhiannon would make you think again. And the mouth on her, still with that accent. She could even shock me. In a long life of uninterrupted ease, Grandma Rhiannon had one real cause for complaint. All her children grew and flourished. But she’d had fifteen of them.