Night Train полностью

The bedroom led off the living room. And I knew where to go. Because I had been to this residence before, maybe a dozen times in half as many years—to drop something off for Colonel Tom, to give Jennifer a ride to a ballgame or a beach party or a function at the Dep Comm’s. Her, and once or twice Trader, too. It was like that, a functional kind of friendship, but with good chats in the car. And as I crossed the living room and leaned on the bedroom door I flashed a memory of a couple of summers back, a party Overmars threw after his new deck was done, when I caught Jennifer’s eye as she was smiling up from the glass of white wine she’d been nursing all night. (Everyone else apart from me, of course, was completely swacked.) I thought then that here was somebody who had a real talent for happiness. A lot of gratitude in her. I’d need a megaton of scotch to make me burn like that but she looked lovestruck on half a glass of white.

I went in and closed the door behind me.

This is how you do it. You kind of wheel around slowly into the scene. Periphery first. Body last. I mean, I knew where she was. My radar went to the bed but she had done it on a chair. In the corner, to my right. Otherwise: Curtains half-drawn against the moonlight, orderly dressing table, tousled sheets, and a faint smell of lust. At her feet, an old black-stained pillowcase and a squirt can of 303.

I have said that I am used to being around dead bodies. But I took a full hot flush when I saw Jennifer Rockwell, glazed naked on the chair, her mouth open, her eyes still moist, wearing an expression of childish surprise. The surprise light not heavy, as if she had come across something she’d lost and no longer expected to find. And not quite naked. Oh my. She’d done it with a towel turbaned around her head, like you do to dry your hair. But now of course the towel was wet through and solid red and looked as though it weighed more than any living woman could carry.

No, I didn’t touch her. I just made my notes and drew my stick-figure sketch, with professional care— like I was back in the rotation. The .22 lay upside down and almost on its side, propped against the chair leg. Before I left the room I turned off the light for a second with a gloved hand and there were her eyes still moist in the moonlight. Crime scenes you look at like cartoon puzzles in the newspapers. Spot the differ­ence. And something was wrong. Jennifer’s body was beautiful—you wouldn’t dare pray for a body like that—but something was wrong with it. It was dead.

Silvera went in to bag the weapon. Then the crime-lab techs would get her prints and measure dis­tances and take many photographs. And then the ME would come and roll her. And then pronounce her.

The jury is still out on women police. On whether they can take it. Or for how long. On the other hand, maybe it’s me: Maybe I’m just another fuckoff. New York PD, for instance, is now fifteen percent female. And all over the country women detectives continue to do outstand­ing work, celebrated work. But I’m thinking that these must be some very, very exceptional ladies. Many times, when I was in Homicide, I said to myself, Walk away, girl. Ain’t nobody stopping you. Just walk away. Murders are men’s work. Men commit them, men clean up after them, men solve them, men try them. Because men like violence. Women really don’t figure that much, except as victims, and among the bereaved, of course, and as witnesses. Ten or twelve years back, dur­ing the arms buildup toward the end of Reagan’s first term, when the nuclear thing was on everyone’s mind, it seemed to me that the ultimate homicide was com­ing and one day I’d get the dispatcher’s call alerting me to five billion dead: “All of them, except you and me.” In full consciousness and broad daylight men sat at desks drawing up contingency plans to murder every­body. I kept saying out loud: “Where are the women?” Where were the women? I’ll tell you: They were wit­nesses. Those straggly chicks in their tents on Green-ham Common, England, making the military crazy with their presence and their stares—they were wit­nesses. Naturally, the nuclear arrangement, the nuclear machine, was strictly men only. Murder is a man thing.