The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

“I’M READY,” Lucy said after she’d finished dressing the next morning.

Corman walked slowly to the door, opened it and ushered her into the corridor.

“Will you pick me up this afternoon?” Lucy asked.

Corman shook his head quickly, his mind concentrating on her with a sudden, biting pain, as if someone had slipped a needle into his brain. “Victor will,” he said, then added impulsively, “I’ll miss you tonight.”

She looked at him oddly, then moved down the hall to the elevator.

They rode down silently, Corman clutching his camera bag while he thought of Trang, the eviction, the way it would send Lexie over the edge. He could see her sitting coolly across the table from him, her dark eyes as piercingly accurate as ever. She would know, no matter how much he lied. She would see it in the little feints, shifts, coughs. He was desperate, she would know that. Her true perception had never failed her in regard to his deficiencies.

“Did you and Joanna have a good time last night?” Lucy asked, prying gently, as she always did.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look like it.”

“We had an argument.”

“Did you break up?”

“I think so.”

She tucked her hand in his arm. “Sorry.”

“It happens.

“Not to Mom and Jeffrey,” Lucy said. “They don’t ever fight.” Corman shrugged. “They’re great people, that’s why,” he said facetiously, before he could stop himself.

Lucy jerked at him slightly. “That’s not nice.”

Suddenly the sound of her voice, the glancing touch of her hand went through him like a searing charge. He stopped and knelt down to her. “I love you,” he said emphatically. “I will always love you.”

She stared at him, alarmed.

“You must know that,” Corman told her.

Her face tightened. “What’s the matter?”

Corman caught the panic in her eyes. “Nothing,” he said quickly, straightening himself, regaining control. “I just wanted you to know that I …”

She watched him fearfully, her eyes glistening. “Stop talking,” she said sternly. “Just stop talking.”

“I didn’t mean to …”

“Just stop talking,” Lucy repeated adamantly.

He reached for her hand, but she drew it away.

“I just wanted you to know that I love you,” he said again, this time more calmly, trying to contain himself.

At the school, he gave her a brief hug. “See you,” he said lightly, forcing a smile. In his arms, she was very stiff, a bundle of dry stalks. “I didn’t mean to get something started,” he explained. “Really, it’s nothing. I just … ”

“Yeah, okay,” Lucy told him. She turned away, then back to him in a quick, smoking whirl. “You’re lying,” she said sharply.

He started to lie again, then decided not to. Instead, he simply nodded and watched her eyes burn into him mercilessly before she spun around and disappeared into the moving crowd.

Corman found Lang on the second floor of Midtown North. He was sitting in the locker room munching a cheese Danish, a pair of handcuffs dangling from his one free hand. He looked brutish, and Corman realized that any photograph would only serve to make him look more so, moving the eye along the sloping belly, then up into the pudgy, featureless face, finally drawing it over to the chrome handcuffs, the way Lang’s elongated head seemed plastered onto their shiny curving surface.

“What’s up?” Lang asked as Corman walked up to him. “You working an EMS beat or something?”

Corman sat down beside him, his eyes moving up the long row of battered metal lockers. Several patrolmen were getting into uniform, struggling with their belts and citation pads, checking out the smudges on their brass buttons.

Lang offered a thin, reptilian smile. “I thought maybe you’d seen that guy I put in Saint Clare’s this morning,” he said. “Fucking skell. Tried to hoist an old lady off a roof on Forty-ninth Street.” He shook his head. “I got there just in time. They may give me a medal.” He laughed. “You should have been there. You could have taken my picture.”

Corman reached into his camera bag and took out the notebook.

Lang eyed it suspiciously. “What’s that?”

“For notes,” Corman explained. “Just in case.”

“Notes?” Lang said. His face tightened. “What kind of notes?”

“I’m still working on that woman,’ Corman said. “And I was wondering if you’d come up with any background on her.”

Lang shrugged. “I asked her father the routine stuff,” he said. “Why’d she do it? Bullshit questions like that.” He took a bite from his Danish and continued talking, his words slightly muffled. “They don’t ever know, the parents. It’s all a mystery to them. Shit, man, he didn’t even know where she was.”

“At the funeral, he was pretty upset,” Corman told him.

“You went to the funeral?”

Corman nodded. “No one there but Rosen.”

Lang washed the Danish down with a gulp of coffee. “Figures,” he said. “With a broad like that.”

“Like what?”

“A loner,” Lang explained. “Nobody in the whole fucking neighborhood knew who she was. All they’d done is, they’d seen her. That was it. As far as shooting the shit with her, passing the time of day? Nothing.”

Corman looked at him curiously. “So you did talk to a few people in the neighborhood?”

“That’s right.”

“Why? If it was a routine suicide.”

Lang smiled. “Because of you, shithead.”

“Me?”

“That fucking button,” Lang told him. “We had to cover our asses.” He shrugged. “So, we asked around a little.”

“Did anything turn up?”

Lang shook his head. “Listen, Corman, I don’t know why you got such a bug up your ass on this case, but take it from me, it’s a complete zero. I’m talking, closed tight. You ask me, that girl dropped out of the whole human race. Put up that sign, you know, DO NOT DISTURB.

“But why?”

Lang smiled. “My guess is, some fucking guy screwed her up.”

“But who?”

“Coulda been some drifter,” Lang told him. “Maybe some ass-hole she bumped into while she was squeezing tomatoes at the A & P.” He shrugged. “That’s the way it is with women. Some scumbag comes along, they can’t get over how great he is.”

Corman glanced at his notebook, its cover still closed, the pencil in his other hand motionless beside it. “So you’ve got absolutely nothing?” he asked.

“Z-E-R-0, Corman,” Lang said, his teeth already sinking again into the Danish.

Corman grabbed a hot dog outside the precinct house and strolled south, ending up across from the burn-out in which Sarah had lived the last days of her life. He sat down on the stoop, his eyes staring up at the fifth-floor landing. For a moment, she must have lingered at the edge, stared down into the blowing rain, tried to find the right sound, then settled on a final silence. He thought of how few facts he’d accumulated on what she’d done in the years before that moment, how little he had to give Julian. He knew the kind he needed, hard, brutal facts that sank deep then rose up to save the day, combined to make a story with a beginning, middle and an end. The end was directly in front of him, a slender line of vertical space from the window to the street. Everything else was considerably less defined, and he suspected that it always would be, not only in Sarah Rosen, but in everyone. A mystery of genes at the very start, and after that, only a slightly less consuming mystery. He thought of Lucy, saw her in a food store squeezing tomatoes while someone watched her from a few feet away, calculated the chances, made his move: Nice tomatoes, huh? Not to answer was to live in fear. To answer was to put your whole life at risk.

He was still considering it all when he heard voices down the street, and turned to see a group of children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. There were two girls and a boy, all of them about the same size, with nut-brown skin and gleaming black hair. A break in the rain had released them, and they were taking full advantage of it, leaping happily in the moving slants of sunlight that periodically swept the street like enormous prison searchlights.

They laughed brightly as they played together, and after a moment Corman found himself inching toward them as unobtrusively as he could. He was almost upon them when a large woman came out of the building, sat on the stoop and watched quietly as the children played. She wore a flowered dress, and her hair was held tightly beneath a dark red scarf.

Corman smiled quietly and nodded toward his camera. “Photographer,” he said.

The woman smiled back. “Nice now, the sun.”

“Yes.”

The woman nodded. “Very nice.”

He pointed toward the abandoned building a few yards away. “A woman was living there.”

The woman said nothing, and watched the children, a small smile playing fitfully on her lips.

“The woman,” Corman said, “the one in the building. Do you remember her?”

The woman nodded and continued to watch the children. “Skinny woman,” she said. “Didn’t look too good. Jumped out the window.” She turned to face him, twirled her finger at the side of her head. “Era loca.” She returned her eyes to the children. “How come you talk about her? You her brother, somesing like that?”

“No.”

“No blood?”

“No blood,” Corman said. He let his eyes drift over to the children. One of the girls was skipping rope while two of the other children twirled it furiously. “Would you mind if I took some pictures of the kids?” he asked.

The woman smiled brightly. “No, that’s good to take the pictures. They like that.”

Corman moved a few feet away, then turned and began walking forward slowly, focusing on the children, taking a shot every few steps. Through the lens, he could see them caught forever in their play, held together and kept safe by the protective walls of the frame. Inside the camera they could be animated, yet suspended, full of life, yet shielded from it, forever clothed, fed, sheltered, with everything they needed … but a life.