Dead Certain

with blood, grabbing for my roommate’s chilly wrist, searching frantically for a pulse.
     

CHAPTER 21
     
    The outside world went away. If there was any sound, I could not hear it—not Elliott’s voice or the locomotive of my own breathing. Instead, there was a rushing sound like steam that filled my skull, and the terrifying realization that I was no longer capable of telling my body what to do. I just sat on my knees in the puddle of cold blood, holding my dead roommate’s hand in mine, staring at the black-handled kitchen knife protruding from her neck.
    Elliott’s strong hands grasped me by the shoulder and pulled me to my feet. In one swift motion he lifted me a few inches off the ground and swung me clear of both the swinging door and the blood, setting me back down on the other side.
    “Are you okay?” he asked, drawing me into an embrace that left his white shirt smeared with Claudia’s blood. I realize now that I should have been less impressed by his concern for me than the fact that even in the shock of the moment his first thought was to get me away from the body and preserve the crime scene.
    I shook my head, unable to find my voice, and buried my head in his neck as if in doing so I could blot out the horror of what was happening. Ever so gently, he pushed me away and led me slowly out onto the sunporch.
    I found myself taken back to the night that Russell died. Even though his was a death that was expected— even, during those last days of anguish, yearned for—in some ways it was exactly the same. A part of me felt as though my soul had been torn in two, as if some fundamental part of me had been ripped shrieking from the roots.
    And then there was the other part, the automaton that just went through the motions. The one who kissed his forehead one last time and straightened the thin sheet of his hospital bed. The one who slipped the wedding ring off his emaciated finger, clasped it in a furious fist, and walked down the somber hallway of the cancer ward, looking for a nurse to tell.
    Elliott called 911 and then joined me in the darkened sunporch to wait for the police. Refusing the comfort of his arms, I stood alone, fighting back a tide of rage and grief, willing myself not to cry. There was still a lot to be gotten through and nothing, absolutely nothing, to be gained by falling apart.
    I heard the sirens before I saw the lights of the approaching squad cars. As usual it was the University Police who got there first. They were so much a fixture in Hyde Park that the people waiting at the bus stop hardly glanced at them as they pulled up to the curb.
    In the early sixties Hyde Park was a neighborhood in jeopardy, in danger of being ripped apart not by the antiwar dissidents who disrupted so many other college communities, but by the Blackstone Rangers, a particularly vicious street gang. In its rational way, the great minds at the University of Chicago discussed whether it would be more cost-effective to move itself lock, stock, and library to Arizona or to hunker down and defend its turf. Thus was the University of Chicago Police Department born. Operating under a special city charter, they were now the largest private police force in the country. My mind clung to these and other irrelevant facts like a shipwrecked sailor clutching at debris.
    It helped me hold my other thoughts at bay, the ones where I replayed the warnings of everyone who’d ever expressed concern about the safety of Hyde Park. All my own jokes about burglars seemed to come back and slap me in the face. I tried to will myself into a sense of numbness, to tell myself that this was a tragedy too big to be absorbed, but still the pain seemed to sear itself into my flesh.
    Ironically the deliberate calm of the police, who were now arriving by the carload, reminded me of Claudia, of her surreal detachment while she was trying to restart Bill Delius’s heart. It might be life or death, but it was also just a job.
    Elliott and I gave our statements to the police. Someone must have turned off the CD player, either that or the disc had played itself through without my noticing. I found that while I could not think, I could at least answer questions, provided that they were simple and the answers clear-cut. Anything involving reasoning or conjecture, like how long Elliott and I had lingered in the vestibule or how long it had taken us to walk through the apartment, was beyond the limits of my cognitive powers.
    By the time