Night Train (6 page)

       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?

       Many worlds, many minds. The interpretation of relative states. Popularly known as 'parallel universes,' Detective.

       Sometimes I have the look of a grave child trying not to cry. I have it now, I know. As with the child, staying dry-eyed while enduring sympathy, it's more like defiance than self-pity. When I don't understand something, it makes me feel defiant. I feel: I will not be excluded from this. But of course you are excluded, all the time. You just have to let it go.

       So it wasn't an academic connection. You met how?

       ... Socially.

       And you moved in together when?

       When she graduated. About eighteen months later.

       How would you characterize your relationship?

       Trader pauses. I light a cigarette with the butt of its predecessor. As usual, and of set purpose, I am turning the interrogation room into a gas chamber. For-hire executioners, bludgeoners of prostitutes' they seldom object to this (though you'd be surprised). A professor of philosophy, I reckoned, might have lower tolerance. That's sometimes all you're left with in here: The full ashtray. Buts and butts, we call it. You're left with the full ashtray, and the rising levels in your lungs.

       Could I take one of those?

       Go ahead.

       Thanks. I quit. When I moved in with Jennifer, actually. We both quit. But I seem to have started again. How would I characterize our relationship? Happy. Happy.

       But it was winding down.

       No.

       There were problems.

       No.

       Okay. So everything was great. Well leave it like that for a minute.

       Excuse me?

       You guys were building for the future.

       Such was my understanding.

       Get married. Kids.

       Such was my understanding.

       You two talked about it... I asked if you talked about it... Okay. Kids. You wanted kids? You yourself?

       ... Sure. I'm thirty-five. You begin to want to see a fresh face.

       She want them?

       She was a woman. Women want children.

       He looks at me, my town flesh, my eyes. And he's thinking: Yeah. All women except this woman.

       You're saying women want children in a different way? Jennifer wanted children in a different way?

       Women want children physically. They want them with their bodies.

       They do, huh? But you don't.

       No, I just think that if you're going to live life...

       To the full...

       No, if you're going to live it at all. Then the whole deal, please. Could I...?

       Go ahead.

       I now had to purge myself of the last traces of affability. Not a big job, some would say. Tobe might say it, for instance. A police works a suspicion into a conviction: That's the external process. But it's the internal process also. It is for me. It's the only way I can do it. I have to work suspicion into conviction. Basically I have to get married to the idea that the guy did it. Here, I have to become Colonel Tom. I have to buy it. I have to want it. I have to 'know' the guy did it. I know. I know.

       Trader, I want you to take me through the events of March fourth. This is what I'm doing, Trader. I want to see if what you give me measures up to what we have.

       To what you have?

       Yes. Our physical evidence from the crime scene, Trader.

       From the crime scene.

       Trader, you and myself live in a bureaucracy. We have some bullshit to get through here.

       You're going to read me my rights.

       Yes, Trader. I'm going to read you your rights.

       Am I under arrest?

       This amuses you. No, you're not under arrest. You want to be?

       Am I a suspect?

       We'll see how you do. This sheet—

       Wait. Detective Hoolihan, I can end this, can't I. I don't have to tell you anything. I can just call a lawyer, right?

       You feel like you need a lawyer? You feel like you need a lawyer, hey, we can whistle one up. Then that's it. This case binder goes to the assistant state's attorney and I can't do a damn thing for you. You feel like you need a lawyer? Or you want to sit here with me and straighten this whole thing out.

       Again Trader bares his teeth. Again the look of difficulty, of impediment. But now he gives a sudden nod and says, Begin. Begin.

       This sheet is headed Explanation of Rights. Read and sign and initial each section. There. And there. Good. Okay. Sunday. March fourth.

       Trader lights another cigarette. By now the small interrogation room is split-level with smoke. He leans forward and begins to speak, not dreamily or wistfully but matter-of-fact, his arms folded, his eyes dipped.

       Sunday. It was Sunday. We did what we always do on Sunday. We slept late. I got up around ten-thirty and made breakfast. Scrambled eggs. We read the 'Times'. You know how it is, Detective. Bathrobes. Her with the Arts, me with the Sports. We did an hour's work. We went out just before two. We walked around. We had a beef sandwich at Maurie's. We walked around. Around Rodham Park. It was a beautiful day. Cold and bright. We played tennis, indoors, at the Brogan. Jennifer won, as always. The score was 3-6, 6-7. We got back around five-thirty. She made lasagne. I packed a bag— You're damn right you packed a bag.

       I don't understand you. We always spent Sunday nights apart. It was Sunday. I packed a bag.

       You're damn right you packed a bag.

       Because this was no ordinary Sunday, was it, Trader. Had you felt it coming? For how long? You were losing her, weren't you, Trader. She wanted out from under you, Trader, and you could feel it. Maybe she was already seeing somebody else. Maybe not. But it was over. Oh, come on, man. It's everyday. You know how it is, Professor. There are popular songs about it. Get on the bus, Gus. Drop off the key, Lee. But you weren't going to let that happen, were you, Trader. And I understand. I understand.

       Untrue. Not the case. False.

       You said her mood that day was what?

       Normal. Cheerful. Typically cheerful.

       Yeah, right. So after a typically cheerful day with her typically cheerful boyfriend, she waits until he leaves the house and puts two bullets in her head.

       Two bullets?

       That surprises you?

       Yes. Doesn't it surprise you, Detective?

       In the past, I have come into this interrogation room with damper ammo than I had on me now, and duly secured a confession. But not often. Men accused of wholesale slaughter, and not for the first time, proven killers with rapsheets as long as toilet rolls: Such men I have coated in sweat with nothing more than a single Caucasoid hair strand or half a Reebok footprint. It's simple. You do them with science. But science was what Trader was a philosopher of. I am going to go in hard now. No quarter.

       Trader, at what point did you and the decedent have sex?

       What?

       The decedent tested positive for ejaculate. Vaginal and oral. When did that happen?

       None of your business.

       Oh it 'is' my business, Trader. It's my job. And I'm now going to tell you exactly what happened that night. Because I know, Trader. I know. It's like I was 'there'. You and her have the final argument. The final fight. It's over. But you wanted to make love to her that one last time, didn't you, Trader. And a woman, at such a moment, will let that happen. It's human, to let that happen. One more time. On the bed. Then on the chair. You finished on the chair, Trader. You finished it. And fired the shot into her open mouth.

       Two shots. You said two shots.

       Yes I did, didn't I. And now I'm going to tell you a secret that you already know. See this? This is the finding from the autopsy. Three shots, Trader. Three shots. And let me tell you, that 'wipes out' suicide. That 'wipes out' suicide. So Mrs. Rolfe upstairs did it, or the little girl in the street did it. Or you did it, Trader. Or you did it.

       The space around him goes gray and damp, and I feel the predator in me. He looks drunk—no, drugged. Like on speed: Not hammered but 'blocked.' I would understand, later, what was happening in his head: The image that was forming there. I would understand because I would see it too.

       It was the look on his face made me ask him: How do you feel about Jennifer? Right now? Right this minute?

       Homicidal.

       Come again?

       You heard me.

       Good, Trader. I think we're getting there. And that's how you felt on the night of March fourth. Wasn't it, Trader.

       No.

       All the hours I have spent in the interrogation room, over the years, are stacking up on me, I feel, all the hours, all the fluxes and recurrences of the heaviest kinds of feeling. It's the things you have to hear and keep on hearing: From your own lips, also.

       I have a witness that puts you outside the house at seven thirty-five. Looking distressed. 'Mad.' Riled-up. Sound familiar, Trader?

       Yes. The time. And the mood.

       Now. My witness says she heard the shots before you came out the door. Before. Sound about right, Trader?

       Wait.

       Okay. Sure I'll wait. Because I understand. I understand the pressure you were under. I understand what she was putting you through. And why you had to do what you did. Any man might have done the same. Sure I'll wait. Because you won't be telling me anything I don't already know.

       With its tin ashtray, its curling phonebook, its bare forty-watt, the interrogation room doesn't have the feel of a confessional. In here, the guilty man is not seeking absolution or forgiveness. He is seeking approval: Grim approval. Like a child, he wants out of his isolation. He wants to be welcomed back into the mainstream—whatever he's done. I have sat on this same honky metal chair and routinely said, with a straight face—no, with indignant fellow feeling: 'Well that explains it. Your mother-in-law had been sick for' how 'long without dying? And you're supposed to take' that 'lying down?' I have sat here and said: 'Enough is enough. You're telling me the baby woke up crying' again? So 'you taught it a lesson. Sure you did. Come on, man, how much shit can you take?' Give Trader Faulkner a reversed baseball cap, a stick of gum, and a bad shave, and I would be leaning forward over the table and saying, again, absolutely as a matter of routine: 'It was the tennis, wasn't it. It was that fucking tiebreak. The' lasagne 'was as lousy as ever. And then she rounds it all off by giving you' that 'kind of head?'