Corman’s eyes drifted down toward his hands. They seemed good to him, strong, capable of expressing complex and indecipherable forms of love; rich, abiding, infinitely subtle forms that held no status in the law.
“I told her I’d speak to you,” Edgar added softly. He touched Corman’s shoulder. “I suggest you talk to her, David. That’s my professional opinion.” He waited a moment, then added, “Also personal, my personal opinion.”
Corman shook his head despairingly. “She’s going to do it. Try to get Lucy.”
“It’s too early to tell exactly what she’s going to do.”
Corman remained unconvinced. “Do you think she’s started anything?”
“You mean, legal action?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Edgar said. “If she were determined to start something, she’d go directly to an attorney. She wouldn’t call me, and she certainly wouldn’t be interested in talking to you.”
“Then what do you think this is all about?”
“I think she wants to persuade you,” Edgar said bluntly.
Corman stared at him unbelievingly. “Persuade me? You mean to give up Lucy? You mean, just do it, voluntarily?”
“That’s my guess,” Edgar said.
Corman shook his head silently.
“What can I say, David?” Edgar added quietly. “We’re not talking about who gets a puppy. We’re talking about a child here. People change their minds.”
Corman remained silent.
“I thought Saturday might be a good time for you two to get together,” Edgar said. “I understand Lexie’s supposed to pick Lucy up on Saturday, and before that you two could go out for a drink, talk things over.” His voice took on a hint of gentle warning. “I wouldn’t let things drift if I were you, David.”
Corman’s eyes shifted over to the rock. Lucy was sitting at the rim of it, her legs dangling over the rounded ledge, her arms flying about as she talked to Giselle. Inside, he could feel a hollowness growing in him, a great engulfing emptiness expanding outward like the ripples of a cosmic blast.
Toward evening, they went to Edgar’s apartment for dinner. Frances greeted them at the door, bussing Corman brusquely on the cheek, then drawing Lucy protectively into her arms, as if trying to comfort her for the way she had to live.
“Want a drink?” Edgar asked as he stepped into the large living room.
“Scotch,” Corman said.
Lucy and Giselle bounded up the stairs to Giselle’s room while Frances bustled about, serving first one hors d’oeuvre, then another, her long, stringy arms buttoned to a silver tray. She seemed curiously drained both by petty service and by being served, and as he watched her, Corman wondered if perhaps the solution to the old war between the sexes might be the reemergence of the woman . warrior, women who resisted protection as fiercely as they did abuse—sent out that message loud and clear: No more!
“Canapé?” Frances asked as she bent toward him, the silver tray flashing in the lenses of her wide designer glasses.
Corman shook his head. “No, thanks.”
They had dinner almost an hour later, everyone situated around the large rectangular table Frances had bought from an East Side antique gallery. It was made of rosewood, and the purity of the grain, its smooth, effortless flow, gave a strange comfort to the entire room. For a moment, Corman imagined himself living among such lovely things, digging for a separate treasure than the one he found in his darkroom or on his walks with Lucy. It was as if elegant, expensive things were what life offered in place of that distant, ineffable richness which began to seem unattainable as time wore on and disappointments accumulated. And so after a while, you joined in a conspiracy with things that gave you comfort, style, prestige, a sense of being more than you really were, having more than you really had. It was perfectly natural, and the trick was simply to forget that there was anything else at all.
“Lucy could spend the night with us, you know,” Frances said quietly after dinner, as the three of them sat in the living room again while the children ran about upstairs.
“Thanks, Frances,” Corman said, “but I’d rather take her home.”
Frances smiled thinly. “You like to keep your eye on her, don’t you?” she asked, as if there were something perverse in his attachment.
“Not exactly.”
“Doesn’t she sort of get in the way sometimes?” Frances continued cautiously.
“Of what?”
“Your other … activities.”
“Like what?”
“Frances,” Edgar warned. “It’s not your business.”
She gave him a scolding look, then turned back to Corman. “Well, you’re a single man, now, David, you must have … needs.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But, surely, with Lucy …”
“She comes first,” Corman said flatly. “She’ll always come first.”
Frances stared at him doubtfully. “But a man your age, without Lexie … it must be difficult to …”
“Not really,” Corman said. He shrugged. “Duty is a feeling like any other feeling,” he said softly. “As a matter of fact, it’s a passionate feeling.”
Frances stiffened somewhat and said nothing.
“Maybe the most passionate there is,” Corman added. He smiled, then stood up. “I’d better get us home now.”
Once back in the apartment, Lucy went to bed almost immediately, and a few minutes later Corman walked quietly into her room. She was sleeping as she often did, on her back, arms and legs spread, the posture of a child who had little fear. Somehow she had reached a strange concreteness, a sense of herself that came across equally in moments of rebellion and acquiescence. He realized that he had no idea where this solidity had come from, only that it was now in place, and suddenly, at the thought of her going to Lexie, riding her bike through the opulent Westchester suburbs, heading down the predictable track that would lead to the right school, marriage, life, he felt a trembling along the fissure that ran from his mind to his heart, and in that instant he decided he would fight for her, and began immediately to formulate a plan.
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 polic
e 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 seasca
pes, 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 City When It Rains Page 7
