Silvera went on pausing. But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t thinking of the time, way back in company lore, that Tom Rockwell stopped one in the Southern, as a beat cop, while flushing hoodies from a drug corner. No, Silvera was just contemplating his own career curve.
I lit a cigarette and said, “Colonel Tom has it playing to homicide.”
He lit a cigarette and said, “Because that’s all he’s got. You shoot yourself once in the mouth. That’s life. You shoot yourself twice. Hey. Accidents happen. You shoot yourself three times. You got to really want to go.”
We were in Hosni’s, the little gyro joint on Grainge. Popular among police for its excellent smoking section. Hosni himself isn’t a smoker. He’s a libertarian. He threw out half his tables just to skirt city law. I’m not proud of my habit, and I know that Hosni’s crusade is one we’re eventually going to lose. But all cops smoke their asses off and I figure it’s part of what we give to the state—our lungs, our hearts.
Silvera said, “And this was a .22. A revolver.”
“Yeah. Not a zip. Or a faggot gun. You know like a derringer or something. The old lady upstairs. She said she heard one shot?”
“Or she’s woken by one shot and then hears the second or the third. She’s blacked out on sherry in front of the TV. What does
“I’ll go talk to her.”
“This case is so fucking cute,” said Silvera. “When Paulie No fluoroscoped her, suddenly we’re looking at three bullets. One’s still in her head, right? One’s in Evidence Control: The one we dug out of the wall at the scene. After the autopsy we go back. There’s only one hole in the wall. We dig out
In itself this was no big deal. Police are pretty blase about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and “the magic bullet”? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn’t be there.
I said, “I’ve seen twice. In suicides. I can imagine three.”
“Listen, I’ve
The truth was we were waiting on a call. Silvera had asked Colonel Tom to let Overmars in on this. Seemed like the obvious guy, with his Quantico connections. And right now Overmars was stirring up the federal computers, looking for documented three-in-the-head suicides. I was finding it kind of a weird calculation. Five in the head? Ten? When were you
“What you get this morning?”
“Nothing but schmaltz. What you get?”
“Yeah, right.”
Silvera and myself had also been working the phones that morning. We’d called everybody who was likely to have an opinion about Jennifer and Trader, as a couple, and we’d both compiled the same dimestore copy about how they seemed to have been made for each other—in heaven. There was, to put it mildly, no evidence of previous gunplay. So far as anyone knew, Trader had never raised his voice, let alone his fist, to Jennifer Rockwell. It was embarrassing: Sweet nothings all the way.
“Why was she nude, Tony? Colonel Tom said Miss Modest never even owned a bikini. Why would she want to be found that way?”
“Nude is the least of it. She’s dead, Mike. Hell with nude.”
We had our notebooks open on the table. There were our sketches of the scene. And Jennifer drawn as a stick figure: One line for the torso, four lines for the limbs, and a little circle for the head, at which an arrow points. A stick figure. Was
“It says something.”
Silvera asked me what.
“Come on. It says I’m vulnerable. It says I’m a woman.”
“It says get a load of this.”
“Playmate of the Month.”
“Playmate of the Year. But it’s not that kind of body. More of a sports body with tits.”
“Maybe we’re coming in at the end of a sex thing here. Don’t tell me that didn’t occur to
Be a police long enough, and see everything often enough, and you will eventually be attracted to one or another human vice. Gambling or drugs or drink or sex. If you’re married, all these things point in the same direction: Divorce. Silvera’s thing is sex. Or maybe his thing is divorce. My thing, plainly, was drink. One night, near the end, a big case went down and the whole shift rolled out to dinner at Yeats s. During the last course I noticed everybody was staring my way. Why? Because I was blowing on my dessert. To cool it. And my dessert was ice cream. I was a bad drunk, too, the worst, like seven terrible dwarves rolled into one and wedged into a leather jacket and tight black jeans: Shouty, rowdy, sloppy, sleazy, nasty, weepy, and horny. I’d enter a dive and walk up the bar staring at each face in turn. No man there knew whether I was going to grab him by the throat or by the hog. And I didn’t know either. It wasn’t much different at CID. By the time I was done, there wasn’t a cop in the entire building who, for one reason or the other, I hadn’t slammed against a toilet wall.
