No one but Mike suspects that the clues that turn up in the investigation are misleading. They are a series of decoys planted by the girl herself. The mass of information adds up: the portrait of a suicide, like any other. Jennifer, the family's angel of light, was actually an extremely depressed young woman who had been taking lithium. Traces of this drug show up in the toxicology report. Mom, Dad, the boyfriend, and even the family doctor will be convinced by this scientific evidence. They may be amazed at their own lack of awareness, but they are not forced to admit that Jennifer's was a case of undetected clinical depression. There's more: Jennifer may have been at the top of her field all through her graduate studies in astrophysics, but recently she had, so her professor Bax Denziger tells Mike, made a major mess. "She fucked up on the job"--tampered with experimental data during her last days at work. Evidence of other strange behavior begins to trickle in: Jennifer had bought some terrible airport-quality paintings. She had paid for them with post-dated checks, and after her death Trader is on hand to receive delivery of these strange purchases in the apartment they had shared. Quite soon a suicide note comes to light: "Since last May I've been on varying doses of a stabilizer," Jennifer explains to Trader. "Serzone, depecote, tegretol--they sound like moral stances. They dry your head out. But they stopped helping." And her final words, written again and again: I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry . . ."

    Eventually Mike will learn that Jennifer had been involved with another man. And not just any man but the singularly repulsive Arn Debs, whom she appears to have picked up at a bar. The only post-suicide appointment in the young woman's calendar is with one A.D. (After Death?). Jennifer has arranged for the man to confirm their date by calling Detective Mike Hoolihan's phone number instead of her own. Why not? Mike admits to herself that she would "cover or middle" for just about any woman who chose to play around. But in Jennifer's absence, it will be up to Mike to make contact with the mysterious Mr. A.D., and in so doing to stumble upon the sorry secret of the girl's taste for sleazy sex. It is at this meeting, in the "Decoy Room" at the "Mallard Hotel" that Mike begins to suspect that Arn Debs is part of the obstacle course that Jennifer has deliberately placed in her path.

    All the pieces now begin to fall into place. As Mike notes, nobody writes a suicide note that contains a witty aside, as Jennifer's does. (Anti-depressants whose names sound like "moral stances.") Trader tells Mike that he and Jennifer had made love several times a day. No manic depressive taking lithium could have done that. And only a moron, Mike feels, could ever be convinced that Jennifer might have been interested in an Arn Debs. Detective Hoolihan observes this man Debs intimately, everything from the sour smell of his breath to his rooster's pride in his red hair. To Mike's trained eye, he is a recognizable type--a criminal lech out of "Fuckbag, Nebraska." "I never believed in Arn Debs. I didn't believe in Arn Debs for a single second," Mike tells us.

    It wounds Mike to think that Jennifer had chosen so clumsy a decoy. But on reflection she recognizes that this is exactly the kind of man ("woman-haters and woman-hitters") that Jennifer, from the age of eight, had seen Mike with:

Sure I'd go for big Arn Debs. And why wouldn't I figure, being so fucking dumb, that Jennifer might go for him too? Did she not see intelligence in me? Did she actually not? Did nobody see it? Because if you take intelligence from me, if you take it from my face, then you really don't leave me with very much at all.

    Mike is right about the intelligence. Jennifer made a critical mistake in overlooking that. In fact Mike is one of the sharpest female characters to have appeared in contemporary fiction. Amis has invested a wealth of "seeing" in his Mike. She has formidable powers of observation and insight. But there is more, much more than Mike herself allows when she laments that to strip away her intelligence is to leave her with nothing. By her own account, the other human capacities have been eroded--perhaps they have decayed. She fears that a lifetime of police work has left her "hardbarked." Pleasant connections have been unthinkable for this raw mannish hard-drinking woman.

    It's mildly amusing, but pathetic to see Mike, who has spent a lifetime boxing with a long list of Shawns and Jons, of Denisses and Duwains, developing a crush on Trader, the gentle soul who was Jennifer's boyfriend. Poor Mike, "still flesh and blood, not hide and ice," has even retained a sense of humor about her predicament: "I cannot get the good guys. I just cannot get the good guys." But it boils down to something quite serious: "I find love difficult," she confesses. "Love finds me difficult. It's this simple: Love destabilizes me, and I can't afford to be destabilized."

    It is no surprise that Mike should seek stability. She was molested--"gored"--by her father at the age of seven, sent to a state-run institution when at ten she resisted him. Then, taking up police work, she soaked and pickled herself in alcohol, all the while indurated as a homicide cop to every form of human degeneracy. As a "police" your standards for human behavior are "desperately low," she tells us. So what can one expect from someone as unloved, as forsaken, as damaged as Mike Hoolihan? Well, according to Jennifer, less than nothing.

    Letters Jennifer wrote to Trader around the time of Mike's breakdown come to the detective's attention during the investigation. These contain unkind comments about the inevitability of Mike's ruinous condition. "What's bothering me," Mike tells us, "is the stuff about my childhood. As if given that, there could be no other outcome." Mike is ruthlessly, wickedly witty about herself, and she makes it plain in a hundred asides that the human product, in her case, is wretchedly, in fact dangerously run down. But remarkably she resents and rejects the finality of a word like "outcome." Given her "given" one would expect her to have given up. But Mike keeps going. As though there could be another outcome: as though it were entirely up to her. "And I sought to improve still further and gave it a hundred per cent." This is Mike--in everything she does. Even though it would be hard to find the woman beneath the layers of makeup applied with a trowel, the buckets of hairdye, the painstakingly chosen slacks and jackets and blouses and hose, Mike continues to make use of these feminine remedies. Jennifer had wounded Mike when she underestimated her intelligence. She dealt her an even sharper blow when she suggested that Mike had reached her limits--had gone as far as she could go.

    Natural female desires and disappointments, too, have become an unaffordable luxury for such a woman. The pain in Mike's damaged liver is sharp enough to drown out any ache in her womb. Besides, she tells us, you don't long for a child, when you are still seeking the father you never had. A father substitute is found, but on grounds that might have been invisible to anyone else. Mike will adopt her boss, Colonel Tom Rockwell (Jennifer's father), because one day she overhears him telling the Mayor he'll send "My Mike" to get an impossible job done--"'My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.'" Rockwell's tone in recommending her, his suggestion that she is capable, reliable, smart--his first choice, his own--is enough to send her weeping to the bathroom. She loves Colonel Tom. Encouragement doesn't seem to be necessary.

    So what are we to make of her insistence that she has a hard time with love? Not much, it turns out. Even more remarkable than Mike's ability to endure is her almost bizarre capacity for love. This rough "police" is the type of woman who looks in on elderly parties, who takes them under her protection, who develops "obligations." Molested and then ejected by her own family, Mike never gave up on love or gratitude: "I'm what they call 'state-raised.' And as a child, I always tried to love the state the way you'd love a parent, and I gave it a hundred percent." In fact she has taken on her police work out of gratitude. The rough police life will make you a smoker and a drinker. No matter. She figures she owes her heart and lungs to the state anyway. But we haven't come close to appreciating big preposterous Mike's gift for love until we read a sentence like this: "Here's something even more mysterious: I never stopped loving my father. Whenever I think of him, before I can do anything about it, I feel great love flooding my heart."

    "Great love." The capacity to keep going and give a hundred percent. That's what we would expect from someone who'd been dealt a strong hand. Someone like our astrophysicist Jennifer. But what if nothing was good enough for Jennifer? Not the love of the best of fathers, the devotion of the best of lovers, the satisfactions of the finest career, nor the optimum pleasures the body. It has been Mike's assumption all along that Jennifer "was somebody who had a real talent for happiness. A lot of gratitude in her." But as she unravels Jennifer's planted clues Mike is forced to reconsider. What if Jennifer was a woman who despised ordinary happiness, who had no gift for love, who was incapable of gratitude? Everyone had agreed with what old grandmother Rebka had said when looking at Jennifer: "We should all be so lucky." "And even though we aren't we're still here," Mike had added. So how is she to feel about the baffling information she is uncovering? As Mike's investigation progresses it becomes apparent that Jennifer simply threw it all away.

    The detective has her own list of the motives for suicide culled from a lifetime of observing the dead and would-be dead. As she investigates Jennifer's end she strikes the likely motives from her list one by one. None remain. "A police" knows that to solve a mystery you need to tie up all the loose ends. In Jennifer's case Mike has unknotted, not tied up. Soon she will have exposed every one of Jennifer's false leads.

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