Night Train полностью

At 08:20 the Associate Professor checks in down­stairs and is shunted up to the fourteenth. I watch him step out. In his right hand he is holding his briefcase, in his left the pink card issued him by building secu­rity at the front desk. The rim of his fedora, which has lost its definition in the rain, is starting to droop over his darkened face, and his overcoat gives off a faint vapor under the tube lighting. His gait is deliberate and kind of wide at the knees. His inturned shoes are squelching toward me.

He says, “It’s Mike, isn’t it. Good to see you again.”

And I say, “You’re late.”

Johnny Mac gives him a leer, and Detective Booker does a good job of chewing gum in his direc­tion, as Trader is led into the zoo. I point to a chair. And walk away. If he likes, Trader can talk philosophy with Jackie Zee. A half-hour later I return. In response to a wag of my head Trader gets to his feet and I reescort him back past the elevators.

At this point, as arranged, Silvera strolls out of the door marked Sex Crimes and says hey Mike, what we got?

And I say something like: We got the dead hooker that was turning ten-dollar dates in AllRight Parking. We got that murdering asshole Jackie Zee. And we got this.

Silvera looks Trader up and down and says need any input?

And I say nah. And I mean it. This will be the sum total of Silvera’s participation. None of that good cop-bad cop bullshit, which doesn’t work anyway. It’s not just that Joe Perp is on to it, having seen good cop-bad cop a million times on reruns of Hawaii Five-O. The fact is that since the Escobedo ruling, which was thirty years ago, bad cop has lost all his moves. The only time bad cop was any good was in the old days, when he used to come into the interrogation room every ten minutes and smash your suspect over the head with the Yellow Pages. And besides: I had to do this alone and in my own way. It’s how I’ve always worked.

I turned, and preceded Trader Faulkner to the small interrogation room, pausing only to slide the key off its nail.

Overdoing it slightly, maybe, I locked him up alone in there for two and a half hours. I did say he could bang on the door if he wanted anything. But he never stirred.

Every twenty minutes I go and take a look at him through the mesh window, which of course is a one­way. All he sees is a scratched and filmy mirror. What

I see is a guy of around thirty-five in a tweed jacket with leather patches sewn on to his elbows.

Axiom:

Left alone in an interrogation room, some men will look as though they’re well into their last ten sec­onds before throwing up. And they’ll look that way for hours. They sweat like they just climbed out of the swimming pool. They eat and swallow air. I mean these guys are really going through it. You come in and tip a light in their face. And they’re bug-eyed—the orbs both big and red, and faceted also. Little raised soft-cornered squares, wired with rust.

These are the innocent.

The guilty go to sleep. Especially the veteran guilty. They know that this is just the dead time that’s part of the deal. They pull the chair up against the wall and settle themselves in the corner there, with many a grunt and self-satisfied cluck. They crash out.

Trader wasn’t sleeping. And he wasn’t twitching and gulping and scratching his hair. Trader was work­ing. He had a thick typescript out on the table beside the tin ashtray and he was writing in corrections with a ballpoint, his head bent, his eyeglasses milky under the bare forty-watt. An hour of this, then two hours, then more.

I go in and lock the door behind me. This trips the tape recorder housed beneath the table where Trader sits. I feel a third party in the room: It’s like Colonel Tom is already listening in. Trader’s looking up at me with patient neutrality. From under my arm I take the case folder and toss it down in front of him. Clipped to its cover is a five-by-eight of Jennifer dead. Beside it I place a sheet headed Explanation of Rights. I begin.

Okay. Trader. I want you to answer some background questions. That’s fine by you, right?

I guess so.

You and Jennifer were together for how long?

Now he keeps me waiting. He takes off his glasses and measures up his gaze to mine. Then he turns away. His upper teeth are slowly bared. When he answers my question he seems to have to move past an impedi­ment. But not an impediment of speech.

Almost ten years.

You two met how?

At CSU.

She’s what? Seven years younger?

She was a sophomore. I was a postdoc.

You were teaching her? She was your stu­dent?

No. She was math and physics, I was phi­losophy.

Explain it to me. You do philosophy of sci­ence, right?

I do now. I switched. Back then I was doing linguistics.

Language? Philosophy of language?

That’s right. Conditionals, actually. I spent all my time thinking about the difference between “if it was” and “if it were.”

And what do you spend all your time thinking about now, friend?

... Many worlds.

Excuse me? You mean other planets?