The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

TWELVE

CORMAN STILL HAD the button in his hand when he walked out of the morgue. For a while, he stood on the steps, glancing randomly about while he rubbed it slowly between his thumb and index finger.

He was not sure what he had, if anything, as far as the woman was concerned. At any moment everything could fizzle, and he’d be back on square one, with Julian shaking his head at another idea gone sour, and Trang circling overhead, and finally, Lexie staring at him from across the table, eyes level, mouth fixed, about to speak: Why should Lucy stay with you?

He felt a wave of anger pass over him and fired a few questions back at her. Why did you leave her? What about Jeffrey and his millions? What about crawling into the nearest lifeboat, money? What about the great feminist now comfortably ensconced beneath Jeffrey’s rich umbrella, thinking nothing, doing nothing except maybe casting a lustful eye toward the pool man once in a while?

He shook his head. His bitterness amazed him. And his unfairness. Rage reshaped the world according to its own wounded angles. He drew in a long, deep breath, like a diver trying for the bottom again, reaching for some impossible treasure, something he could bring up from the depths and hand to Lexie on the gleaming beach: Look what I found for Lucy.

He started down the steps, then stopped again, thinking of his father. Luther Corman. What a prize. He could imagine him in court, testifying for Lexie, answering her lawyer’s final question: Now, Mr. Corman, in light of your experience with your son, do you think he should retain custody of your granddaughter? He could see that unctuous, stricken face staring directly at the judge, tragic, mournful, Old Agrippa in a Brooks Brothers suit: Regrettably, no. He would say it just like that. Regrettably, no. And the judge would feel such pity for him. How could such a dignified and accomplished man have such an immature, wastrel son? Dignified? What about all those smarmy end-runs around the IRS? Accomplished? At what, besides sobriety and, as far as Corman knew, marital fidelity? As a father, he’d hardly existed at all. Lexie had immediately recognized that. “He’s like Neptune,” she’d once said. “When you reach out to touch him he dissolves.” But even in this, Corman thought now, Lexie had been a little off. It wasn’t that his father had dissolved, but that there’d never been anything there in the first place.

Again, he shook his head silently, stunned by his own anger, and wondered if perhaps it was the only emotion he knew all the way down to its appalling core.

Corman found Milo Sax exactly where he expected to, feeding a group of bickering pigeons in Hell’s Kitchen Park. Lazar had introduced them several years before, when Sax had still been working for the News. At that time, Pike had been anticipating an offer from the Washington Post and had started grooming Milo as his replacement, but Sax had blown it with a thoughtless reference to the fact that Pike’s oldest son had been living with a roommate on Christopher Street for a little too long than was altogether natural. “If my son was a fag, I’d damn well know it,” Pike had snapped back, cutting the line of succession in one quick slice. Sax had hung on as a steady shooter for a while after that, but the persona non grata status had finally worn him down, and he’d gone free-lance for a time, then drifted into idleness. Now, at forty-four, he already seemed old and slightly senile, as if, when he’d hung up his camera, he’d handed over part of his mind as well. He had a small apartment on 47th Street where he continued to live off the dwindling resources the last beats of an ancient trust fund were still able to pump into his hands. It was dank and smelly, and whenever the weather wasn’t too wet or cold, Sax usually headed for the park.

“Hello, Milo,” Corman said as he sat down on the bench beside him.

Sax arced a fistful of seed over the heads of the pigeons and watched them scurry toward it, gurgling loudly and flapping their wings. “First time I’ve been able to get out here in a couple days,” he said. “The rain’s been locking me in.”

Corman nodded.

Milo turned toward him. “I heard about Lazar. Best there ever was, Corman. You see him much?”

“I go up when I can.”

“I’d go if it didn’t bother me so much seeing him like that,” Milo said. “You’ll tell him I spoke of him.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“He can understand that, my not coming.”

“No problem, Milo.”

Sax seemed relieved. “So, what are you doing around here?” he asked.

“I took some pictures of that woman who took a leap last Thursday night,” Corman told him, “I was wondering if you might have heard anything about her.”

“I heard about the jump,” Milo said. “The neighborhood buzzed a little.”

“You pick up anything?”

“A nut case, so they say,” Milo told him, “but who am I to judge?”

“Anything else?”

“They have mostly illegals on that block,” Milo said. “Haitians, wetbacks, what-have-you. They keep to themselves. We’re all gringos to them.”

“If you’d heard anything at all, it might help,” Corman said.

“What’s your angle?”

“A book.”

“Book? On a jumper?”

“How she got to be one, something like that.”

Milo shrugged. “Sounds like a real bummer. But who am I to judge?”

“I’ve picked up a little information on her,” Corman said. “Jewish. Graduated from Columbia. Stuff like that.”

“Sounds like a real oddball,” Milo said. “But who am …”

“Anyway, Milo,” Corman interrupted. “You know the neighborhood, and I was thinking if you didn’t know anything about the woman, you might have a few contacts.” He offered a slender smile. “The fact is, I don’t know how to go about this sort of thing. Investigation, I mean.”

“It’s not your thing,” Milo said. “A shooter. I understand. We’re peepshow types. We like to look.”

Sax’s eyes squeezed together slightly, and Corman could see the glimmer of what he had once been, clever, incisive, always right on the money when it came to how things were. “That’s why I came to you, Milo,” he said.

“ ’Stead of Lazar. I know.”

Corman nodded. “So, have you got anything for me on this?”

Milo thought a moment, dug his hands into the small paperbag in his lap and tossed another scattering of seed into the air. “There’s a Haitian over there,” he said. “Pay-lay-too, something like that. A frog name. Who knows how they spell it. But it sounds like Pay-lay-too. Anyway, he runs this little hole-in-the-wall deli-type place at Forty-seventh and Twelfth. If this woman needed a quick fix of soap, toilet paper, something like that, she’d probably have hit his place.” He gave a third desultory toss of seed. “Maybe he can tell you something.”

Corman smiled. “Corner of Forty-seventh and Twelfth, you said?”

“That’s right.”

Corman stood up. Thanks, Milo,” he told him. “I owe you one.”

Milo shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “I’m just paying one back to Lazar.”

The deli was just where Milo had indicated, but before going in Corman took a few exterior shots from various positions across the street. Its cluttered window had the usual assortment of canned goods, along with a small rotisserie where a few cubes of reddish-pink meat turned slowly on a thin metal spit. It had the weary, careless look of a business that had lost faith in itself, was destined to survive only as a memory in an old woman’s mind: And when I was a little girl, I used to buy candy in this shop on our block. There was always a man behind the counter, but I can’t remember what he looked like.

He looked like a fighter, the nose flattened, the left jaw slightly askew, a face that looked as if it had been constructed by someone who hadn’t done enough research. The moment Corman glimpsed him, he recognized the slow, lumbering heavyweight Victor had always bet and lost on in the preliminaries. At the bell he’d always plodded to the center of the ring, then stood there, throwing wild, haphazard punches as if he were fighting more than one man. He’d usually gone down by the fourth, his handlers carrying him from the ring like a huge black sofa.

“You’re a boxer,” Corman said as he stepped up to the counter. The name came to him. “Bowman, right? Archie Bowman?”

Bowman looked at him suspiciously, as if Corman were a bill collector who’d just stumbled on a mark. “Was a fighter,” he said in a thin, edgy voice. “Retired in ’78.”

“I used to see you at this little ring they have in Bensonhurst,” Corman told him. “With my brother.”

One eyebrow arched upward. “Your brother a fighter?”

Corman shook his head. “No. A gambler.”

Bowman’s mouth opened slightly. All his teeth were gone, but from the bluish look of his gums, Corman thought neglect had done more damage than the ring. As for his body, it was marvelously preserved, and Corman realized that in a photograph the shiny ebony skin would contrast nicely with the occasional scar, capture the perfect contradiction of vulnerable invincibility. “My brother always bet on you,” he said.

Bowman didn’t seem to believe him. “I couldn’t take the punishment,” he said. “You got to be able to take the punishment. Just being in the ring, it ain’t enough.”

“I guess.”

Bowman shrugged indifferently. “I got some posters, though,” he said. “I got ’em on my wall. Guys I fought, I got posters of them, too.” He shook his head disdainfully. “They never come to nothing. It’s like I tell people, you fight some guys, you can say you done it. But these palookas I come up against, they was a dime a dozen.” He tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “No mentality, you know. You can’t just fight with your hands.”

“Some of them didn’t look so bad,” Corman told him.

Bowman shrugged, unwilling to argue. “You a gambler, too?” he asked.

“No.”

“Some people say they ruined the game,” Bowman said. “Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. ’Cause in a way, betting is doing something. It ain’t just looking. Your brother fix ’em?”

“I don’t know,” Corman admitted. “He might have.”

“But you was never in on that?”

“No.”

“What do you do then?” Bowman asked quickly, firing questions now like short jabs.

“I take pictures.”

“Who for?”

“Nobody in particular,” Corman told him. “Newspapers sometimes.”

Bowman stared at him expressionlessly. “Pictures,” he repeated. “How come you doing that around here?”

“Somebody told me I should look up a guy who used to run this store,” Corman said. “He’s supposed to be Haitian. Got a French name.”

“Well, you’re looking for old Peletoux,” Bowman said. “But he ain’t here no more.”

“He moved?”

“God took him home,” Bowman answered crisply, without mourning. “Me and his wife… we was—you know—sort of close. She asked me to fill in for him, so I been here the last few weeks. You know, till she gets things settled. Then we’re leaving town.”

“I see.”

“How come you want pictures of old Peletoux?” Bowman asked with a short laugh. “He ain’t much to look at.”

“I heard he knew a lot about the neighborhood,” Corman said. “The people in it.”

“That’s what you want to take pictures of?” Bowman asked unbelievingly. “The people ’round here?”

“One person,” Corman said. “That woman who jumped out of her window last Thursday night.” He opened his camera bag, pulled out one of the photographs of the woman and handed it to him. “Early in the morning. About a block from here.”

Bowman’s eyes lingered on the picture. “Yeah, that got things stirring.”

“Did you know her?” Corman asked.

“I seen her. She come in a few times, bought some things.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“She didn’t do no talking,” Bowman said. “She come in, pick up what she wants. She put up the money. Sometimes it come up short. I say, no. So she put something back. Sometimes, it works the other way. She come up with too much money. I always give change, but I never seen her count it.”

“Did you ever see her with anyone?”

“No. She was always alone ’cept for that doll she carried around with her. She acted like it was real. Always holding it real close, like she was afraid somebody was going to snatch it from her. She even bought food for it.”

“Similac?” Corman asked. “She bought that here?”

“Yeah.”

Corman glanced down the center aisle. At the end of it he could see a few cans of Similac nestled among a smattering of other baby products, diapers, baby food, a small box of rubber pacifiers. For an instant he got the same feeling he’d once had in the bar near Gramercy Park where 0. Henry had written “The Gift of the Magi” during one long snowy afternoon, the fibrous touch of the Great Man’s presence, the soft scratch of his pencil, the sense of what he’d been though. “Would you mind if I took some pictures?” he asked.

Bowman shrugged. “Don’t matter to me. I ain’t here for long no way.”

Corman drew out his camera and headed down the aisle, taking pictures as he walked, one picture at each step, until a single can of Similac filled the neat rectangular window of the viewfinder.

When he’d taken the last shot, he returned to the front of the store. Bowman was watching him steadily as he came up the aisle. “Was she somebody, that woman?” he asked.

“I don’t know who she was,” Corman said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.” He took a slip of paper from his jacket pocket and wrote down his name and telephone number. “If you hear anything about her or find anybody in the neighborhood who knew anything about her, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.”

Bowman took the paper and dropped it into the drawer beneath the counter. “These people around here, they don’t do much talking. They don’t none of them have the right papers, you know? They don’t want to be seen. And ‘cause of that, they got to be blind, too.”

“Still, if …”

Bowman grinned widely. “These here pictures, you going to get some money for them?”

“I hope so,” Corman said, then heard Pike’s voice out of the blue, tossing him another line if Julian’s turned to dust, warning him to grab it before it got away, sink his fangs into Groton’s death. In the end, every shooter wants to come in from the rain.