The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

CORMAN ARRIVED at Julian’s office a few minutes later and placed the few photographs he had of the jumper on his desk. “She might be the one you’re looking for,” he said.

Julian went through the photographs quickly, then glanced up at him. “What’s the whole story, David?”

“She jumped out a tenement window in Hell’s Kitchen a few days ago.”

Julian nodded. “With a doll?”

“She threw it out first,” Corman said. “She’d been feeding it Similac.”

Julian’s eyes drifted back down toward the pictures. “Terrible.”

“She graduated from Columbia,” Corman said.

Julian’s eyes shot up toward him. “Columbia?” he said unbelievingly.

“And she was Jewish,” Corman added.

Julian’s eyebrows drew together slightly. “From a prominent family?”

“I don’t know yet,” Corman said. “But I was thinking about that idea you mentioned,” he said. “Slow decline.”

Julian smiled, let his eyes fall back to the photographs and linger there. “What else do you know about her?”

“Just what I told you so far,” Corman said. “I wanted to be sure you were interested.”

Julian thought about it for a moment, squinting slightly as he continued to gaze at the pictures. “I’m interested,” he said finally. “I need a few more details, but the basic situation sounds promising.” He looked back up at Corman. “What’s your time frame?”

“For what?”

“Coming up with a proposal.”

Corman shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Julian gave him a pointed look. “He who hesitates, and all that.”

Corman nodded. “I understand.”

“So I could expect something right away?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Julian said brightly, hesitated a moment, then added, “And you might think about hooking up with a writer on this story.”

“Writer?”

“For the text.”

“I wasn’t thinking about a text,” Corman said. “Just pictures.”

Julian looked doubtful. “Well, a writer might help with the research, too.” He smiled gently and began writing on his memo pad. “Here’s somebody who might be interested,” he said, then handed Corman the paper.

“Willie Scarelli,” Corman muttered, reading from the sheet.

“You know him?”

Corman nodded. “We’ve run into each other.”

“He did a piece on that bag lady who froze to death on the Williamsburg Bridge a few years ago,” Julian said. “He traced her whole life. Got a TV movie out of it. He might be of service in the current project.”

Corman looked up from the paper. “I’d rather work alone, Julian. You know, just pictures.” His voice sounded weak to him, his resolve already crumbling slightly.

“Well, that’s your decision in the end,” Julian said. “But if you change your mind, you can usually find Scarelli at the Inside Track. Sixty-third and Lexington. As it turns out, he loves the ponies.”

“All right,” Corman said. He pocketed the memo and started to pick up the pictures.

Julian’s hand shot toward them. “May I keep them?”

Corman hesitated, without knowing why.

“To help with an initial pitch,” Julian explained. He smiled. “One of those corridor conferences we have around here. The pictures could be useful.” He glanced back at them. “Very good work, David. Compelling.”

Corman drew his hand back from the photographs but felt the uneasy sensation he was letting go of something.

“And get more,” Julian added. “The tenement, the neighborhood. Everything you can. Facts. Pictures. The works, right way.” He smiled happily. “This could be big, buddy-mine, a new direction for you.”

The sky remained overcast, but there were breaks in the clouds from time to time, and as Corman stared up at the tenement’s fifth-floor landing, he could see patches of light as they swept back and forth across the dark window like faded searchlights. For a time, he simply stared at the window, as if the morning light might reveal something he hadn’t noticed before.

Finally he drew his eyes away and glanced to the left. A young man was standing on the top step of a cement stoop across the street. He wore a black jacket with a gray wool hood, and he kept his hands deep in his pockets as he shifted nervously from one foot to the other. A stream of people moved in and out of the building, nodding to him silently, then rushing up the stairs to get what they needed.

Crack houses operated twenty-four hours a day, just as the legendary opium dens of the old city that had looked down on the teeming crowds of Chinatown. Because of that, Corman was sure a lookout had been posted the Thursday night the woman had leaped out the window. From his place on the stoop, the lookout would have been able to see the blue bundle arc out of the fifth-floor landing, then the woman after it, her arms and legs clawing at the rain.

The man on the stoop eyed him suspiciously, but Corman knew not to flinch. Instead, he nodded solemnly as he walked up to the stoop and lit a cigarette.

The man said nothing. He had large brown eyes set very deep in their sockets and badly pocked skin, scars from what must have been a horrendous case of teenage acne. He moved like a tightrope walker, forever tilting left and right in quick little jerks.

“I’m not a cop,” Corman told him.

The man’s hands moved inside the pockets of his jacket. “What you want, man?” he asked sharply. His eyes darted up and down the street, catching Corman’s face briefly with each sweep.

“I’m just working an angle,” Corman said. “About the woman who jumped out the window a few nights ago. Were you around when that happened?”

The man’s eyes settled on him stonily, but he didn’t answer.

For a moment Corman thought of offering him money, but all he had was a five spot, and he figured the lookout was probably pulling down from six to twelve hundred a day. A five spot would make him laugh. “I just have a couple of questions,” he said.

The man considered it a moment, suddenly shrugged. “Go ahead. Just be quick.”

“Did you see anybody else around when the woman jumped?”

“I seen some guy talking to a cop,” the man said. “Talked to him for a long time, his whole life story, man.”

“What’s his name, do you know?”

“Simpson’s what somebody called him,” the man said, then nodded toward the small brick building directly across the street. “I see him come out of that building over there sometimes Day-tripper, leaves in the morning, comes back at night.”

“How about the woman, did you know her?”

The man shook his head. “I seen her a few times.” The eyes leaped away again, resumed their frantic outlaw dance.

“Did she have a man?”

The lookout grinned. “A man? Shit. She ain’t no slash, man. She look too sick for a man.” He glanced down the street and stiffened. “Time’s up,” he said with a sudden coldness.

Corman stepped back from the stoop. “Okay,” he said immediately, turned quickly and saw a car as it moved toward him from the end of the street. The bagman had arrived. “Thanks,” he added, then headed back down the street and turned into the alleyway beside the building, following the same route Lang had used the night of the jump. The hole was still exposed, the plywood on the ground before it. Corman crouched down and slipped inside the building.

The entire floor was dark, except for the slant of dusty light which came in from the uncovered entrance. Corman drew his flash out of the camera bag and pressed the button. The darkness drew back instantly, gathered in the far corners of the room, crouched there like a frightened animal. Everything else swam in a hazy, gray light.

Corman moved forward slowly, his eyes combing the bare, cement floor as he walked to the back of the room, then up the stairs, pausing at each landing to illuminate the surrounding interior. Each floor was completely bare, mostly stripped of flooring, ceiling, everything but the steel and cement skeleton of the building itself.

It was the same on the fifth floor, except that Corman didn’t need his own light to see it. The windows had not been sealed with wood or cement blocks, and it was easy to see how entirely barren it was, stripped of everything, just like the others.

He walked down the center of the room. Overhead was a cracked skylight and hundreds of brownish water stains. Large flaps of ceiling hung from the supporting beams. Bits of plaster had fallen onto the cement floor, and he could hear his feet scraping dryly over them until he reached the window, leaned against the jamb and stared out toward the surrounding area. Through the misty air, he could see the flat gray expanse of the Hudson, a stretch of rotten wharf, the hazy outline of New Jersey. The rest was what he’d already seen, the tenements across the street, most of them bricked up and abaftdoned, and an old warehouse of rusting corrugated tin, shaped like a Quonset hut. It had probably once been used as a makeshift World War II barracks for soldiers bound for the European front.

He turned back toward the stairs and glanced at the floor. He was surprised there were no empty crack vials or hypodermic needles. Even if the woman hadn’t been a junkie, other people had once used the place as a shooting gallery. If they’d left anything behind, the woman had gotten rid of it.

He took a few pictures on the fifth floor, shot the walls, the window itself, the floor, then did the same on each of the other floors, this time with a flash. When he’d finished, he returned to the window and stared down a moment, his eyes drifting toward the place on the street where her body had come to rest. For a moment, he tried to imagine what she must have felt during the few seconds she’d fallen toward the street, wondered whether she’d felt her skirt lift as the air swept under it, or the cold rain on her face and arms, whether her eyes had taken in the sprinkled light of the surrounding city, or locked themselves instead on the small blue bundle toward which she hurled at terrific speed. He even swung out over the ledge, half his body dangling in the air, as he edged his camera downward, before realizing that without falling with her, he could not capture such a radical descent.

As he drew back, his eyes caught on something, a faint, pale fleck just at the border of his own peripheral vision. He bent down quickly and saw a small white button poised at the very edge of the window, teetering there shakily, as if still trying to decide. He stepped a few feet away, lowered himself down onto his stomach, and angled the camera so that the button seemed to be already half-tipped over the ledge. In his mind, he could see Julian nodding appreciatively at the picture that would result, smiling at the way it worked to sum everything up, a single torn button, just the right touch.

Kellerman looked surprised when Corman walked into his small office just outside the freezer room. “Forget something?” he asked.

Corman shook his head. “That woman,” he said, “the jumper. I want to check something else.” He took a small square of tinfoil, opened it on Kellerman’s desk.

“A button,” Kellerman said dryly as he glanced at it. “So what?”

“I found it near the window,” Corman explained, “the one she jumped out of.”

Kellerman looked up at him. “What’s your interest in all this?” he asked, this time more out of curiosity than cautiousness.

“To sell a book of pictures,” Corman said unemphatically.

Kellerman looked surprised. “A book of pictures? About some burned-out suicide?” He shook his head. “I guess people’ll buy anything, right?”

Corman wasn’t interested in discussing the commercial possibilities. “I was wondering if the button came off the dress she was wearing when she took the leap,” he said.

“Well, I guess I could help you with that,” Kellerman said. He eased himself from his chair and motioned for Corman to follow after him. They walked to the end of the corridor, then turned left into a room filled with tightly packed cardboard boxes. Kellerman snapped a clipboard from a peg at the door, flipped a few pages and drew his finger down a line of numbers.

“There it is,” he said. He looked up, scanned the wall of boxes, then headed off to the right. Once again, he motioned Corman along behind him. “It should be over here,” he said.

The box had been labeled with a Police Property decal, white background, blue lettering, all of it circling the outline of a badge.

“This is all I took off her,” Kellerman said, as he slipped the box from the shelf and brought it over to a long wooden table a few feet away.

Corman pulled the pasteboard flaps open. The dress was balled up in the upper righthand corner. He drew it out slowly and spread it across the table. It was white, just as he remembered, only with red piping along the hem, the two shallow breast pockets and the deep V-collar. There was a small tear on the front, low and on the right side, near the hem. A few slender threads hung from it. Four small white buttons ran from the waist upward toward the collar. The last one, which should have rested at the point of the V was missing.

“There’s where your button came from,” Kellerman said authoritatively.

Corman folded the dress neatly and returned it to the box.

“I don’t think the cops are handling this as a case anymore,” Kellerman said. “There’s no point in them working a suicide.”

Corman closed the box, then thought for a moment about what kind of shots might work for the book, a torn dress, a missing button, pictures that would do what Julian wanted, and which he now heard as a kind of frantic chant in his mind: Compel. Compel. Compel.