The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

TEN

“YOU SURE ARE quiet,” Lucy said as they made their way toward school the next morning.

“I have a lot on my mind,” Corman told her.

“About the rent?”

“That’s part of it.”

Lucy’s eyes drifted over to the opposite side of the street. “That restaurant’s changing its name again,” she said.

Corman nodded quickly. “Uhm.”

“It’s like it changes every two weeks or something,” Lucy added, almost irritably, as if such changes signaled a grave lack of resolution.

“Yeah,” Corman said dully.

Lucy tugged at his arm. “You’re really out of it,” she said. Corman glanced down at her and hoped she wasn’t right.

After dropping Lucy off at school, Corman walked quickly to the subway and took the Seventh Avenue Express downtown. On the way, he went over the murderers or victims Julian might be interested in, silently repeating the words he’d used: slow decline, incremental fall. That was what he needed, a book of pictures, something Lexie could hold in her hand, show to her friends, a Product, for Christ’s sake, that could convince her he was still worthy to keep Lucy in his care.

Once above ground, Corman hoisted his bag more securely onto his shoulder and headed south, moving quickly until he reached police headquarters.

One Police Plaza was a massive brick cube which sat like a huge red block between Chinatown and the East River. Its straight parallel lines of small square windows made it look exactly like what it represented, the inflexible authority of the law. The old police headquarters had been very different, a beautiful beaux arts building, domed, graceful, as aristocratic in appearance as some of the old chiefs had been aristocratic by birth. The developers of the new city had already turned it into a luxury condominium.

The police darkroom and photographic laboratory was in the basement of the building. Its dark green double doors faced a well-lighted corridor which was usually filled with the familiar smells of photographic work.

Charlie Barnes was sitting at his desk when Corman came into the room. Long black strips of negatives were lined up in front of him, each neatly numbered with a red grease pencil. Harvey Grossbart stood over him, peering at the negatives. “That one,” he said.

Barnes marked it, then glanced over to Corman. “You look like hell.”

Corman shrugged, said nothing.

“Lang would like something like that,” Grossbart said as he pointed to a particularly gruesome picture.

Barnes shook his head in disgust. “He stinks to high heaven, Lang does. I’d bet my life savings he’s on the pad, a big one too, a horse couldn’t swallow it.”

Grossbart shook his head. “Not in Homicide. There’s no money in Homicide.”

“Just what you can snatch from the room of the recently deceased, right?” Barnes asked with a smile.

Grossbart looked at him tensely. “You wired, Charlie? You got an IAD wire up your ass?”

Barnes laughed.

Grossbart leaned toward him slightly. “Because if you do, I’ll tell you every fucking thing I know.”

Barnes laughed again, this time a little nervously. Then he took a single photograph from the stack on his desk. “Here’s a good one from that hotel killing.”

Grossbart took the picture and lifted it slightly for better light.

“You showed up for that one, didn’t you, Corman?” Barnes asked.

“Yes,” Corman said. He stepped over and looked at the photograph.

It showed a woman lying facedown on a bed, naked from the waist up, the lower part of her body wrapped in a dark brown towel. A large red bra hung from one of the bedposts. Over the other one, a man’s hat, an old gray homburg, was tipped, almost jauntily. The woman stretched across the full length of the bed, her brown feet near the headboard, her hair pouring over the end of the bed like a wash of brackish gray water. She was somewhat overweight. Rounded folds of skin hung from her sides, tan and doughy.

From the photograph, it was easy to tell what had happened to her. Her husband had pressed her face into the mattress, probably to muffle her screams. Then, for some reason Corman could not imagine, he’d swept her hair over the top of her head before nosing the barrel of the pistol into the fleshy hollow at the base of her skull.

She hadn’t died immediately, and because of that, almost the entire end of the bed was soaked in blood. It seemed to drip from the bottom edge of the picture, moist and glistening, the kind of shot Lazar called a “blood slide.”

“Were you still there when the husband came out?” Barnes asked.

Corman nodded. The man had gone berserk after shooting his wife, waving his pistol out the hotel window while he raved about what a bitch she was. The woman had lain unconscious, bleeding to death, for almost a half-hour while the SWAT team got into position. By then, the hotel had become the center of neighborhood attention, and Corman had stood by, watching quietly as the frenzy grew steadily around him.

“Came out naked as a jaybird, I hear,” Barnes added.

“Yeah, he did,” Corman said. With his hands high above his head, he remembered, his smooth, hairless belly almost completely white in the bright afternoon sun. From the second floor landing, the crowd around the hotel had been able to see his small shrunken penis quite clearly as it peeped out from its nest of gray pubic hair, and they had cheered and hooted loudly while the man stood trembling uncontrollably above them.

“Love and hate,” Grossbart whispered suddenly, his eyes still concentrating on the picture. He glanced at Corman. “That’s the bottom line.”

“Not exactly the news of the world, Harv,” Barnes said. “What happened to the guy?”

“The wagon to Bellevue,” Grossbart said.

“Yeah, right,” Barnes said testily. “He’ll be out cruising the social clubs, hunting for a new wife in … what do you think, Corman … six months?” He glanced down at the picture. “Meanwhile, the broad is history.”

Grossbart’s eyes swept the desk again. “Just print up the ones we marked,” he said. “The DA wants to have a peep.” Then he left the room.

Barnes gathered up the negatives, glanced up at Corman. “So, what can I do for you?”

“The jumper in Hell’s Kitchen last Thursday,” Corman said, “I was wondering if you’d heard anything. A name, maybe.”

“I heard they tagged her,” Barnes told him. “But as far as the name, you’ll have to call Lang.” Something seemed to occur to him suddenly. “But you’d already know that, wouldn’t you, Corman?”

“Yeah.”

“So how come you’re down here?” Barnes asked. “You should be at Manhattan North, quizzing Lang.”

Corman nodded, knew Barnes was right, but still wanted to avoid Lang as long as possible, along with the hot, disinfecting shower he always felt he needed after talking to him. “How’d they get the ID?” he asked. “A canvass?”

“The way I hear it, there was some paper on her,” Barnes said.

“Rap sheet?”

Barnes laughed. “No. Turns out it was a diploma.”

Corman’s eyes widened. Slow decline. Incremental fall. “Diploma?” he asked.

“That’s what I heard. It could be bullshit.”

“Where was the diploma from?”

“You’re thinking some beautician’s school, right?” Barnes asked. “Or one of those second-story paper mills?” He laughed. “I heard it was Columbia.”

“Columbia?” Corman said. He saw Julian nodding, stroking his chin, thinking it might be just the thing to advance a little cash on. “Shepherd took some pictures that night,” he said. “Would you mind if I had a look?”

Barnes looked puzzled. “Use Shepherd’s pictures? I thought you took your own.”

“I did,” Corman told him. “But I might be able to use a few of his, too.”

The puzzled look remained on Barnes’ face.

“For something bigger,” Corman explained reluctantly. “A follow-up, you might say.”

Barnes smiled knowingly. “So that’s why you came down here,” he said. “You’re after some shots.”

Corman smiled thinly. “If I can use them, I’ll be sure that Shepherd gets …”

Barnes waved his hand indifferently. “Yeah. Yeah. Right. You’ll see he gets a mention.” He shrugged wearily. “Anyway, they’re all printed up. But before I hand them over, I want you to take a look at something else.” He opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a color photograph. “What do you think of this?” he asked as he handed it to Corman.

Corman lifted the picture, once again angling toward a better light. It was a standard eight-by-ten color photograph of a small windswept cottage on the coast. Tall blades of sea grass, golden in the autumn sun, rose in a radiant wave at the edge of the dune. They looked like thin, glimmering strips of gold. Even their shadows against the white beach sand appeared to glow.

“I bought that little house last week,” Barnes said proudly. “What do you think?”

“Nice.”

“You can’t believe the quiet up there,” Barnes said. “Nothing but the sea, you know? Whoosh. Whooosh. Just like that. It puts you right to sleep.” He nodded toward the photograph. “But I wasn’t just talking about the place.”

Corman looked at him quizzically.

“The picture,” Barnes explained. “What do you think of the composition?”

Corman’s eyes concentrated on the photograph once again. He saw the perfect symmetry of the house and surrounding landscape, the carefully cropped edges that allowed for each blade of sea grass to display its full height. Nothing flowed off the picture, or encouraged the eye to look for more.

“Pretty,” Corman said. “Nice.”

“It’s not a street shooter’s thing, I know,” Barnes told him. “But I like seascapes, landscapes, stuff like that.”

Corman kept his eyes on the picture. It was a vision of some kind, a dream of perfect peace, repose, contentment, a place where all the bills were paid and no one ever tried to take your children from you. But it also seemed strangely isolated, shut away from the general texture of life in a way that made the sea look like a barred window, the beach like a bolted door.

Barnes leaned forward, ran his finger up a single shimmering reed. “See how I handled that shadow? It just throws things into better relief, makes them look brighter.”

Corman nodded gently.

Barnes tugged the picture from Corman’s fingers. “Anyway, I thought it was pretty good. Technically, I mean.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Not the sort of thing you shoot, I know that,” Barnes repeated.

“No,” Corman admitted. “Not my thing, but still …”

“Right,” Barnes said quickly as he returned the photograph to his desk drawer. “Anyway, these are Shepherd’s,” he added as he snapped a plain manila folder from a stack of them on his desk and handed it to Corman. “You’ll like them better.”

The lounge was on the third floor. It looked like every other lounge Corman had ever seen, square tables with Formica tops and thin chrome legs, a solid wall of vending machines, some that slowly wheeled things to you on a stainless steel carousel, others that simply dropped it into a collecting trench behind a hinged plastic door.

The room was empty, but Corman walked all the way to the far back corner anyway. He sat down, lit a cigarette, then took out the short stack of photographs from the envelope and looked at them one by one.

The first was a long shot which Shepherd had taken from several yards away. It posed the woman as a dramatic center to the surrounding backdrop of empty streets and dark, overhanging tenements. Sheets of blowing rain glistened in the headlights of the patrol car at the curb and in the streetlight above it. To the right, a few feet away from the body, the Recorder stood with his pen and notebook poised for action. His job was to keep a list of everyone who showed up at the scene, all the medical personnel, all the patrolmen and detectives. He was looking almost directly at the camera. Corman assumed that he was scribbling Shepherd’s own name down in his notebook. An ambulance stood in the right foreground, and just behind it, a radio patrol car. Lang was off in the far right corner, motioning a man out of the crowd, the one who later turned out to be the witness.

The second shot was a little closer. Now the woman’s body stretched further across the rain-slick street. The tires of the ambulance could be seen a few feet away from her outstretched arm, but the rest of it was open, the white and orange body, the flashing hoodlights, the two attendants who leaned against the already open rear door. The unlighted tenements and warehouses loomed larger, and seemed almost to bend toward the woman from above. Lang had disappeared from the frame, but the witness had not. He could still be seen standing in the right background, one hand in the air, talking excitedly to a figure who had been cut away.

The next five shots were in steadily tightening close-ups of the woman herself. The first had been taken only a few feet from her right side, and her long slender body stretched almost across the entire length of the frame. Her fingers seemed to curl around the right edge of the photograph, her feet to press back against its left wall.

The second concentrated on the face, the flattened nose held slightly up, the chin pressed against the rough street, the rain-soaked hair sprayed out in all directions, the puffy, half-opened right eye staring dazedly into the flat gray surface of the pavement.

The third had been taken from the opposite side. The face disappeared behind a curtain of drenched and matted hair, the legs severed at the ankles, her feet stretching beyond the edge of the frame. Her arm was now in full relief, and Corman could see the needle marks which ran up and down it, the cluster of raised purple dots which gathered like a tiny village in the pale valley of her elbow.

The fourth shot was from above. As he looked at it, Corman could easily tell how it had been taken. Shepherd had not used a ladder for this one. He had straddled the body at the waist, bent forward, set his line of vision, and pressed the button. To Shepherd, it must have seemed right at the time, a tight close-up, taken from directly overhead. But now it looked awkward, unsteady, oddly faked, the product of an urge to do more than record. It was as if, just for a moment, Shepherd had fallen victim to a different calling, decided to pump his picture up with a touch of drama, a pinch of trendy grief. He’d tried to find an angle that would weep a little, sputter into art, but he’d only gotten something that looked staged,“ as if the street had just been hosed by the technical crew, the rain blown by large fans shipped in from Hollywood, the woman about to get up, dry her hair and sprint to the waiting trailer for a line of coke.

The last photograph was taken from even further above the woman’s body. It was the one Corman had seen Shepherd take from the ladder. It showed almost the entire body. The head was in the foreground, with the trunk and legs stretching backward, like the stern of a boat shot from some position above the forward deck.

“Those yours?”

It was Grossbart, and Corman didn’t have to look up from the photograph to know it. Grossbart had a distinctive voice. It seemed to come from the ground.

“Shepherd’s,” Corman said. He slid the pictures over to Grossbart.

Grossbart looked at the photographs one by one, concentrating on each in turn. “Why’d he take this one?” he asked after a moment. “What’s he trying to do, impress his girlfriend?”

Corman glanced at the photograph. It was the one Shepherd had shot as he’d straddled the body. “He got carried away,” he said.

“I don’t like bullshit,” Grossbart said. He slid the photograph under the others. “Not much of a mystery,” he growled.

Corman pressed the tip of his cigarette into the small tin ashtray on the table. “She had a college diploma,” he said. “Barnes heard it was from Columbia.”

Grossbart was unimpressed. “So? Even smart people get depressed.”

“And the Similac,” Corman added. “She had cans of it. She was feeding it to the doll.”

Grossbart leaned forward very slightly. It was hardly perceptible, just a small inching toward the edge of the table.

“At the same time,” Corman told him pointedly, “she was starving.”

“How do you know?”

“The way she looked.”

“Hypes don’t put on much weight,” Grossbart said. “You know that.” Again there was the slight inching forward, a subtle, stalking movement, silent, cat-like. “What’s your point, Corman?”

Corman shrugged. “It’s interesting, that’s all.”

Grossbart did not seem amused. “You trying to make a mystery out of this thing?” he asked. Before Corman could answer, he waved his hand dismissively. “Forget it. This one’s not a mystery.”

Mystery was common police slang for a murder that would probably never be solved, but Corman knew Grossbart meant more than that. He meant something about the woman, the doll, the dark fifth-floor landing, all that must have finally gathered together in order to get them there. That was the greater mystery, the one that was always less dense and immediate than who did what to whom. It had a mood of aftermath which clung to it like a faint, dissolving odor. While the body lay fresh and soft, the mystery was solid, tense, compelling. But after it had been scooped up, after the blood had been washed away, the walls repainted, sheets changed and carpeting replaced, the intensity of it drained away, and the other mystery settled over the interior space of the room, the street, the mind. It was ghostly, intangible. No one could go at it anymore, drag it down, cuff it, toss it into the paddy wagon. It had become faceless, impossible to contemplate without disappearing into it yourself. Everybody knew that. In Corman’s estimation, it was perhaps the only thing on earth that absolutely everybody knew.

Grossbart’s right index finger shot out toward the pack of cigarettes on the table. “Mind if I have one?”

“No.”

Grossbart snapped up the pack, shook one out and lit it. “Had a hell of a mess on Essex Street this morning,” he said. “Guy strung a couple cats onto the clothesline of his building. Just let them dangle in the goddamn airshaft.” He looked at Corman. “Why would a guy do that?”

Corman shook his head.

“Something eating him, I guess,” Grossbart said. His eyes drifted down toward the pictures. “Some people go out a window, some string up a cat.” He shrugged. “The way it is,” he added, groaning slightly as he drifted back into his chair.

Corman leaned forward slightly. “I could use a little help, Harvey,” he said.

Grossbart looked surprised, as if he thought Corman was about to ask for a handout. He said nothing.

“I need to find out some things about this woman,” Corman told him.

“Why?”

“I’m trying to work up a story.”

Grossbart shrugged. “It’s not my case. You need to talk to Lang.”

Corman shook his head.

“You got something against him?”

“The way he is,” Corman said.

“The perfect combination,” Grossbart said with a slight sneering smile. “Stupidity and corruption.”

Corman nodded.

“But the way it is, you got to work with everybody,” Grossbart said. “Like a friend of mine said, ‘Birth ain’t a screening process.’”

Corman smiled.

Grossbart took a draw on the cigarette. “What are you after?”

“Just call it a gig,” Corman said. “I want to track her down a little.”

Grossbart shrugged. “So go ahead. It’s a free country.”

“How could I find out who she was?” Corman asked.

“Well, the only guy besides Lang who’d know about her ID right now would probably be Kellerman at the morgue. He’d have to have a confirmed ID before he could release the body.”

Corman nodded.

Grossbart looked at him curiously, with a hint of disappointment.

“You never struck me as the grab-for-the-brass-ring type,” he said.

Corman thought of Lucy. “Depends on the ring, I guess,” he said as he gathered up his things and headed for the subway and the morgue.

Sanford Kellerman was the assistant ME in charge of the morgue. He was just finishing up an autopsy when Corman walked into the dissecting room. Body parts were scattered here and there, some in jars, some in transparent plastic bags, and the smell, despite the heavy doses of disinfectant, was almost more than Corman could stand.

Kellerman nodded as Corman stepped up to the table. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“There was a suicide last Thursday night,” Corman said. “In Hell’s Kitchen.”

“The one on 47th Street?” Kellerman asked. “Jumped out the window?”

Corman nodded.

“All the work’s been done already,” Kellerman said. He picked up a severed hand, dropped it into a transparent plastic bag. Then his eyes shot over to Corman. “You look familiar.”

“We’ve met before,” Corman told him.

“Oh yeah,” Kellerman said. “I remember now.” He sunk his hands deep into the meaty open cavity of the body on the table. “That’s right, you’re a … a …”

“Photographer,” Corman said. “Free-lance.”

“Yeah,” Kellerman said. “You came down about a year ago.”

“To shoot a few faces,” Corman reminded him. “I had a death-mask idea.”

Kellerman laughed. “Death mask, huh?” He shook his head. “Everybody’s interested in the morgue except the people who work in it.” He laughed again. “Sometimes I want to get one of them down here to clean out the condensation drains. That would give them a taste of what it’s really like. You have somebody crawl up a pipe and scoop out a handful of maggots, that’ll be the last of their interest in the morgue.” His eyes returned to the body. “So what are you interested in now, more death masks?”

“That woman I mentioned,” Corman said. “Did anyone come down to identify her?”

Kellerman nodded. “Surprising, too. Like they say on the street, a zip-top piece.”

“She was Jewish?”

Kellerman smiled. “Unless she was trying to pass,” he said.

“Name’s Rosen. Sarah Judith Rosen.” He shook his head at the thought of it. “You know, we don’t get many nice Jewish girls down here.”

“Maybe she wasn’t very nice,” Corman said. He took out his notebook, wrote down the name. “Know anything about her?”

Kellerman shrugged. “No. Why, is she somebody’s daughter?”

“She was a college graduate,” Corman said. “At least that’s what they say at Number One.”

Kellerman looked at Corman curiously. “So, not only a Jewish girl, but a college girl. The world is getting strange.”

“Do you know anything at all about her?”

“Just that somebody’s picking her up tomorrow.”

Corman felt the tip of his pen bear down on the open notebook. “Who?”

“A funeral home on the Upper East Side,” Kellerman said.

“They left a message on the machine. Tomlinson’s Chapel.” He watched Corman intently. “You think she was some big shot’s daughter?”

Corman let the question pass. “She was starving, wasn’t she?” he asked.

“Yeah, she was,” Kellerman replied. “Very severe malnutrition.”

“What was she hooked on?”

“Hooked?”

“The needle marks.”

Kellerman shook his head. “She wasn’t hooked on anything at all.”

“But there were needle marks,” Corman said. “I took some pictures of them.”

“Those were needle marks, all right,” Kellerman said. “But not from shooting dope. They were too big for that.”

“What’d they come from?”

“My guess is she’d been selling blood,” Kellerman said. “The puncture marks were very large. They looked like they came from the sort of needle they have at those blood-buying places down on the Bowery.”

Corman nodded and guessed that selling blood was the way she’d been able to afford the Similac. “When are they going to pick up tomorrow?” he asked.

“Message said one P.M.”

“Would you mind if I came by?” Corman asked.

Kellerman looked at him cautiously. “What for?”

“I just want to take some pictures,” Corman assured him. “I won’t bother anybody.”

Kellerman thought about it. “I guess it would be okay,” he said finally. “But just be sure you act like you happened by. I don’t want the relatives or whatever to think I set them up.”

“Okay,” Corman said. He looked back down at the body, saw Sarah Rosen’s instead, Julian’s idea floating in his mind like a small white raft in a stormy ocean vastness.

Once outside, Corman quickly got the number of Tomlinson’s Chapel and gave them a call.

The voice at the other end sounded as dead as his customers. “Tomlinson’s Chapel. How may I help you?”

“I was wondering about someone who’s going to be at your place tomorrow.”

“Be at our place?”

“A body. A woman. Sarah Judith Rosen’s the name.”

“Yes, what about her?”

“I was wondering if you could tell me who’s making the arrangements for her.”

The voice grew suspicious. “Are you a relative, sir?”

“No.”

“And what is your capacity, may I ask?”

“I’m a photographer.”

The voice chilled. “I’m afraid we’re not allowed to give out information to unauthorized individuals.”

“I just need the name of her parents,” Corman said.

“I’m sorry,” the man replied firmly. “But as I told you, we are not allowed to give out information to unauthorized individuals.”

Corman started to blurt another question, but the click of the man hanging up silenced him, as if a label had been stamped on his forehead, blocking him forever: an unauthorized person.