Night Train полностью

Silvera is younger than me and the wheels are coming off his fourth marriage. Until he was thirty-five, he claims, he balled the wife, girlfriend, sister and mother of every last one of his arrests. And he cer­tainly has the look of the permanent hardon. If Silvera was in Narcotics, you’d right away make him for dirty: The fashionably floppy suits, the touched-up look around the eyes, the Italian hair trained back with no part. But Silvera’s clean. There’s no money in murder. And a hell of a detective. Fuck yes. He’s just seen too many movies, like the rest of us.

“She’s naked,” I said, “on the chair in her bed­room. In the dark. There are times when a woman will willingly open her mouth to a man.”

“Don’t tell Colonel Tom. He couldn’t handle it.”

“Or play this. Trader leaves at 19:30. As usual. And then her other boyfriend shows.”

“Yeah, in a jealous rage. Listen, you know what Colonel Tom is trying to do.”

“He wants a who. I tell you this. If it’s a suicide, I’m going to feel an awful big why.”

Silvera looked at me. Police really are like foot-soldiers in this respect at least. Ours not to reason why. Give us the how, then give us the who, we say. But fuck the why. I remembered something—something I’d been meaning to ask.

I said you make a pass at anything that stirs, right?

He said oh yeah?

I said yeah. If your rash isn’t acting up. You ever try Jennifer?

He said yeah, sure. With someone like that you got to at least try. You’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t at least try.

I said and?

He said she brushed me off. But nicely.

I said so you didn’t get to call her an icebox or a dyke. Or religious. Was she religious?

He said she was a scientist. An astronomer. Astronomers aren’t religious. Are they?

I said how the hell would I know?

“Would you put that cigarette out, please, sir?”

I turned.

Guy says, “Excuse me. Ma’am. Would you put that cigarette out, please, ma’am?”

This is happening to me more and more often: The sir thing. If I introduce myself over the phone it never occurs to anybody that I’m not a man. I’m going to have to carry around a little pack of nitrogen or whatever—the stuff that makes you sound like Tweetie Bird.

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