from Night Train
I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement– or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also.
…
Here is my personal “ten-card.” At the age of eighteen I enrolled for a master’s in Criminal Justice at Pete Brown. But what I really wanted was the streets. And I couldn’t wait. I took tests for state trooper, for border patrol, and even for state corrections officer. I passed them all. I also took the police test, and I passed that, too. I quit Pete and enrolled at the Academy.
I started out as a beat cop in the Southern. I was part of the Neighborhood Stabilization Unit in the Forty-Four. We walked footposts and did radio runs. Then for five years I was in the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit. Going proactive– decoy and equipment– was my ticket to plainclothes. LAter, in another test, and downtown, with my shield. I’m now in Asset Forfeiture, but for eight years I was in Homicide. I worked murders. I was a murder police.
A few words about my appearance. The physique I inherited from my mother. Way ahead of her time, she had the look now associated with highly politicized feminists. Ma could have played the male villain in a post-nuclear road movie. I copped her voice, too: It has been further deepened by three decades of nicotine abuse. My features I inherited from my father. They are rural rather than urban–flat, undecided. The hair is dyed blonde. I was born and raised in this city, out in Moon Park. But all that went to pieces, when I was ten, and thereafter I was raised by the state. I don’t know where my parents are. I’m five-ten and I go 180.
Some say you can’t top the adrenalin (and the dirty cash) of Narcotics, and all agree that Kidnapping is a million laughs (if murder in America is largely black on black cime, then kidnapping is largely gang on gang), and Sex Offenses has its followers, and Vice has its votaries, and Intelligence means what it says (Intelligence runs deep, and brings in the deep-sea malefactors), but everyone is quietly aware that Homicide is the daddy. Homicide is the Show.
In this second-echelon American city, mildly fames for its Jap-financed Babel Tower, its harbors and marinas, its university, its futuristically enlightened corporations (computer software, aerospace, pharmaceuticals), its high unemployment, and its catastrophic inner-city taxpayer flight, a homicide police works maybe a dozen murders per year. Sometimes you’re a primary investigator on the case, sometimes a secondary. I worked one hundred murders. My clearance rate was just above average. I could read a crime scene and, more than once, I was described as an “exceptional interrogator.” My paperwork was outstanding. When I came to CID from the Southern everybody expected my reports to be district quality. But they were downtown quality, right from the start. And I sought to improve still further and gave it a hundred percent. One time I did a very, very competent job, collating two rival acocunts of a hot-potato homicide in the Seventy-Three: One witness/suspect versus another witness/suspect. “Compared to what you guys give me to read,” prounounced Detective Sergeant Henrik Overmars, brandishing my report at the whole squad, “this is fucking oratory. It’s goddamn Cicero versus Robespierre.” I did the work as best I could until I entered my own end-zone and couldn’t do it anymore. In my time, I have come in on the aftermath of maybe a thousand suspicious deaths, most of which turned out to be suicides or accidentals or plain unattendeds. So I’ve seen them all: Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, drunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, burders. I have seen the bodies of bludgeoned one-year-olds. I have seen the bodies of gang-raped nonagenarians. I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at a t.o.d. is to weigh the maggots. But of all the bodies I have ever seen, none has stayed with me, in my gut, like the body of Jennifer Rockwell.
***
The Psychological Autopsy
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It’s the night train.
Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I don’t want to see.
Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner.
I’ve got to slow this shit down. I’ve got to slow it all down.
***
With TV you expect everything to measure up. Things are meant to measure up. The punishment will answer the crime. The crime will fall within the psychological profile of the malefactor. The alibi will disintegrate. The gun will smoke. The veiled woman will appear in the courthouse.
Motive, motive. “Motive”: That which moves, that which impels. But with homicide, now, we don’t care about motive. We never give it a second’s thought. We don’t care about the why. We say: Fuck the why. Motive might have been worth considering, might have been pretty reliable, might have been in okay shape half a century ago. But now it’s all up in the fucking air. With the TV.
I’ll tell you who wants a why. Jurors want a why. They want reruns of Perry Mason and The Defenders. They want Car Fifty-Four, Where Are You?
They want commercials every ten minutes or it never happened.
That’s homicide. This is suicide. And we all want a why for suicide.
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