Corman kept shooting. From the corner of his eye, he could see Fenster shrinking back into the crowd. He made no effort to stop him, but instead concentrated once again on the prophet, his lens sweeping up and down the long, white robe while the prophet continued to stand rigidly at the wall, his eyes straight ahead, his face impassive, his body entirely rigid, except for the trembling in his knees.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
THE HOMICIDE DIVISION of Midtown North was on the second floor. It was an unsightly bull pen. Each time Corman found himself there, he took a few minutes to concentrate on its disarray, the scattered desks and bulging files, the way everything spilled across the floor so that the room itself looked as if it existed in the aftermath of something violent, the leavings of a storm. As always, it was the people who drew his attention, especially the civilians. They usually looked either miserable or inexpressibly happy, and as he’d watched them over the years, Corman had at last realized that this was because most of them had just received either the best or worst news of their lives, that they’d once again escaped or finally fallen victim to their folly.
Lang’s desk was toward the back of the room. He was sitting in a swivel chair. A dirty yellow foam oozed from the cracked arms, and tiny flecks of cigar ash clung to the foam.
“What’s up?” he asked as Corman stepped up to his desk.
“It’s about that woman,” Corman told him, “the jumper. I was wondering if you’d found out anything?”
“Found out? Found what?”
“About her life,” Corrnan said.
Lang looked at him suspiciously. “What’s in it for you, Corman?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Bullshit,” Land snapped. “What you got, a story idea, something like that?”
“I don’t write.”
“Costa sold film rights, did you know that?”
“For what?”
“That killing at the Met a few years ago,” Lang said. “That opera singer. Shit, man, he got a job consulting for the movie.” He laughed. “Fucking Costa, can you believe that? Consulting on a movie?” He shook his head at the absurdity of it. “He couldn’t consult on his own eating habits.” He laughed again, then stopped, his eyes staring evenly at Corman. “Pictures, then. You trying to sell some pictures?”
“I was wondering about her personal effects,” Corman replied crisply.
“You mean what was on her?” Lang asked. “Nothing. Just that old dress and her panties. No rings on her fingers, or in her ears. Nothing. She didn’t have anything in her pockets.”
“What about in her place?”
“Jesus, Corman, you saw what that was like.”
“I heard there was a diploma from Columbia.”
Lang nodded. “That’s right. A couple Jakes found it the next morning. Framed and everything.”
“Do you have it?”
“We gathered it up, yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“A few odds and ends,” Lang said. He continued to stare at Corman curiously. “Suppose you tell me what this is all about.”
“I can’t,” Corman said truthfully.
“Because it’s top secret, that it?” Lang asked mockingly.
“Because I’m not sure myself.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Lang hooted. “Let me tell you something, Corman. I’ve dealt with you free-lance shooters for thirty years, and I never met one that wasn’t a petty fucking grifter from top to bottom. You telling me you’re different?”
Corman said nothing.
Lang sat back in his seat, placed his large beefy hands behind his head and leaned back into them. “Let me tell you a little story. A few years back, a rookie got a call in the Village. Dog loose, you know?”
Corman nodded.
“The guy goes down, sees the fucking dog running along West Fourth Street. It’s barking and snarling a little, and a few people are scooting into the shops to get away from it. To the rookie, it sounds bad, so he draws his service revolver, calls the goddamn dog, says, ‘Here, boy, here, boy,’ and pats his fucking leg.” He took a puff on the cigar. “The dog turns, starts coming toward the Jake, still barking and snarling and shit. My guy’s beginning to get a little ill at ease, but he knows he can’t run from the son-of-a-bitch, not a cop, not a cop in uniform, not from a goddamn dog. So, well, worse comes to worse, and he plugs it. Puts a bullet right in its face. A patrol car shows up right away, and they hustle the rookie into the back seat. Puff, up comes a shooter. Like a genie out of a fucking bottle. He says he wants to take a picture. He says it’s for his own private collection. He takes a shot of the rookie and the next day it’s on the front page of the News. The rookie has his hands in his face. He looks fucking pitiful. The caption says, DOG TIRED.” Lang laughed edgily and leaned forward. “So what I want to know is, how you going to screw me with this angle you’re working on?”
“I’m interested in the woman,” Corman said. “That’s all.”
“You got a problem with anything else?”
“No.”
“You think I fucked up anything?”
“Not that I saw.”
Lang watched him a moment longer, then relaxed slightly. “Okay,” he said finally. “Who knows, maybe you can do me a favor sometime. What do you want to see?”
“Whatever you picked up in the building.”
Lang shrugged. “Well, we bagged a few items that night,” he said, “but everything else got tossed by the landlord. He had some guys come in and sweep everything out. I guess he wanted to seal it up before some other squatter set up housekeeping.”
“There was still stuff there,” Corman told him.
“Yeah?” Lang said. “How do you know?”
“I went over there.”
“You went inside?”
Corman nodded.
“Find anything?”
Corman thought a moment then decided to tell the truth. “A button.”
Lang laughed. “A button?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we did better than that,” Lang said. He stood up and waved Corman alongside him. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Corman followed him downstairs, then into the basement, and finally, through a long, dusty corridor, to a small room in the north corner of the building. The walls were unpainted gray cinder blocks, and overhead, Corman could see the exposed underbelly of the building itself, pipes, electrical cables, the large wooden crossbeams which supported everything.
“If it’s not a mystery,” Lang said, “we keep everything down here, unless somebody claims it.”
“And no one has?”
Lang smiled. ‘Well, we’re not exactly talking about the Queen’s jewels.” He walked to a large metal filing cabinet, pulled out the drawer, and from it, a single manila envelope. “There you have it,” he said as he handed it to Corman. “Her net worth.”
Corman took the envelope over to a small wooden desk, sat down and stared at the name: SARAH JUDITH ROSEN. “Where’s the diploma?” he asked.
“In the envelope,” Lang said. He stepped to the door. “Just be sure to turn out the lights when you’re through in here,” he added as he left the room.
Corman opened the envelope and scattered its contents across the desk. They were only a few items: a rusty nail file, a compact with a cracked mirror, a pack of matches with two left in place, a small pacifier and a baby rattle shaped like a fat clown. There was an oval rubber change purse, the sort that opened up like a small toothless mouth when the ends are pressed together. Crumpled inside, Corman found a receipt from a blood bank operation on the Bowery.
The diploma was in a teakwood frame. The glass was cracked, and one corner of the frame was splintered. It had awarded Sarah Rosen a bachelor of arts degree in 1988.
Everything else had been inventoried on a police property form, then discarded. The form itself had been folded three times and inserted into the manila envelope. Item by item, it listed the re
st of Rosen’s worldly goods: a set of toy blocks, along with a plastic pail and shovel, a few infant sleeping suits, one dress, two pairs of jeans, one belt, three pairs of panties, a washcloth and two towels, a pair of sandals, a terry cloth robe, and three dollars and seventy-three cents in cash. There was a notation at the bottom of the list. It said officially what Lang had already told him, that sometime on Saturday the landlord had had the building swept clean of everything else.
Corman let the paper slip from his hand. It fell onto the table, one of its sharp corners piercing the center of the articles spread out around it. It had fallen into an unexpectedly dramatic position, each article at precisely the right angle to another. Corman quickly took out his camera and photographed it. With the right exposure, it would have a sad, haunting quality, perhaps end up as the final picture in Julian’s book, stark, graphic, lonely, a life reduced to what it had left behind … and he hadn’t had to move a single thing.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
CORMAN ARRIVED at Bellevue a few minutes before Sarah Rosen’s body was due to be picked up. It was a massive building, bulky, the sort that always looked overfed. The old city had built it while still reeling in the aftershock of yellow fever, and as he stood at the top of its long line of stairs, it was easy for Corman to imagine the final days of the Yellow Jack Plague, the street cries of “Bring out your dead,” the way the people had wrapped the bodies symbolically in yellow sheets before tossing them onto the open lorries that took them to the common burial pit that had been dug at Washington Square. The plague had lasted for many months, and Lazar had often spoken of it, the empty streets and deserted houses, the stricken, feverish looters who’d staggered through the countless abandoned shops, sometimes dying in them, faceup on the floor, their arms still filled with plunder. Only the illustrators of the period had truly flourished, sketching the disaster one line at a time.
Kellerman glanced up as Corman came into his office. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” he said.
“I’m here,” Corman answered.
“As far as I know, everything’s set,” Kellerman told him. “You ready?”
Corman nodded, his mind considering Julian’s idea once again: slow decline, incremental fall. “Has anyone else come around to see her?” he asked. “Called to ask about her, anything?”
Kellerman shook his head. “No.”
“Father, mother, anyone from her family?”
“Nope,” Kellerman repeated, then led Corman into the building, briskly escorting him down the corridor to his office.
Once behind his desk, Kellerman started in on the morning mail. “By the way,” he said, slicing open one envelope after another. “How do you want to do this? I mean, if any relatives show up, I don’t want them to be disturbed.”
“I can shoot from pretty far away,” Corman told him.
“Far enough so they wouldn’t even see you?”
“Maybe,” Corman said. “Where does the hearse pick them up?”
“Back driveway.”
“I could set up from across the lot,” Corman said. “I don’t think anybody would even know I was there.”
Kellerman looked relieved. “That sounds good. Why don’t you go ahead and get into position? If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
Corman walked down the corridor and out into the back lot of the building. An ambulance, orange-striped, with Hebrew lettering across the side, was parked not far away. He stationed himself just behind its rear doors, pulled out his camera, changed the lenses for the shoot, then panned to the right. At the far end of the building, he could see the doors of the Emergency Ward. In the old city, horse-drawn ambulances had raced up to them from China-town, bearing the dead from the Tong Wars, or later, piles of bodies, frozen together like stacks of ice cubes during the Blizzard of ’88. And later still, Lazar himself had come—stricken, his right arm clinging to Corman’s shoulder as the two of them slammed through the red double doors.
It began to rain lightly again. Corman tucked the camera beneath his coat and peeped around the edge of the ambulance.
A couple of female orderlies came out of the building. One of them was crying, and the other one was comforting her as best she could, touching her arm once in a while as she spoke. Corman drew his camera out again. Through the lens he could see their faces clearly. They both looked Filipino, something like that, and the older woman could easily have been the mother of the younger one. They had the same, slightly flattened noses and large, almond-shaped eyes. The young one kept shaking her head frantically, until the older one stopped it by drawing her face up tight against her chest. For a time, they remained locked in that position. Then a man stuck his head out the door and waved them back into the building. They followed his orders immediately, the young one dabbing her eyes as she walked back inside.
Kellerman strode out onto the loading ramp a few minutes later. He was dressed in a long white lab coat, and he was pulling a pair of rubber gloves off his hands. His head made a slow turn until he caught sight of Corman. Then he tapped the face of his wristwatch and nodded crisply.
Within seconds the hearse from the funeral chapel arrived. It was dark gray instead of black, with sleek chrome lines running front to back. It made a wide turn in the lot, moving slowly, its long black windshield wipers sliding rhythmically across the glass, stopped for a moment, then headed backwards until its rear door reached the loading ramp.
Corman lifted the camera and began shooting.
Two men got out of the hearse. They were dressed in black suits. One was tall, black, very broad-shouldered. The other one looked Hispanic. He was short and stocky, with thick legs and small feet. They walked up the short ramp to the rear doors and disappeared behind them.
Corman replaced the lens cap, drew the camera back under his coat and waited.
The doors at the back of the morgue opened suddenly a few seconds later, and Corman jerked himself back to attention and began shooting as a long stainless steel stretcher came out, pushed from behind by the black attendant. The Hispanic walked behind him until they neared the end of the ramp. Then he bolted forward quickly and opened the back of the hearse. The other man maneuvered the stretcher into place, then the two of them loaded the body and returned to their seats in the hearse.
Corman continued shooting, concentrating on the hearse, the two men whose dark outlines could be seen hazily behind the rainswept windshield. For a time they sat solemnly, then the Hispanic turned toward the other man, said something, and they both laughed.
Corman had taken ten more pictures before Kellerman finally walked through the doors, then slowly down the loading ramp. For a time, they talked through the open window of the hearse, then they shook hands and the car pulled away.
“Well, did you get what you needed?” Kellerman asked as he walked across the cement lot toward Corman.
Corman recapped the lens and tucked the camera beneath his coat. In the distance, he could see the taillights of the hearse as it disappeared around the corner of the building.
“Not much, was it?” Kellerman said. “No relatives. Nothing.”
Corman stepped out from behind the ambulance, his eyes still watching the driveway, the traffic on Second Avenue. “You know the address of the chapel they’re taking her to?”
“Sure,” Kellerman said. “We do some business. They always leave a card.” He drew the card from his pocket and read off the address: “247 East 68th Street.”
Corman wrote it down in his notebook and glanced back toward the avenue. He could see the little Italian restaurant where it had happened, hear Lazar’s voice rumbling through the subdued light, then the sudden halt, the look in his face, the single word he’d managed to say before the left side of his mouth had twisted downward: “Corman.”
“So, you like being a shooter?” Kellerman asked.
Corman looked at him. “What?”
“I mean, it must be a killing grind, right?” Kellerman said.
Cor
man started to answer, but the crackle of his police radio interrupted him. He dialed up the volume and listened. There was some sort of disturbance on Broadway at University Place. A patrol car was requested.
“I think I’ll check this out,” Corman said quickly.
“Yeah, sure,” Kellerman said. He looked faintly envious. “It must be nice once in a while,” he said. “Dealing with the live ones.”
A small crowd had already gathered at the corner of Broadway and University Place when Corman got there. It formed a kind of jagged semicircle around a taxi and a police patrol car. Two patrol-men stood next to the cab, listening silently as a well-dressed elderly man addressed them.
“I’m not interested in being treated special,” the old man declared loudly. “I have never asked for that. But by the same token, I refuse to be abused.”
A slightly overweight man leaned idly against the cab. He wore a fishnet T-shirt despite the chilly fall air, and his eyes looked slightly puffed, as if from lack of sleep. “I didn’t abuse you, pal,” he said to the old man.
The old man’s body jerked upward. “I am not addressing you, sir,” he cried. “I am not addressing you.”
“Okay, okay,” one of the patrolmen said to him. “Just tell me what happened.”
Corman readied his camera and subtly elbowed himself more deeply into the crowd, searching for a position from which he could get the whole small drama into his lens. By the time he found it, the old man was talking again, while the man in the T-shirt remained silent, his arm draped protectively over the roof of his cab.
“I know the ordinances of this city,” the old man said. “I make it my business to know them. And when this … this … I don’t know what I should call such a person.”
“Call me Dominic, pop,” the driver said with a laugh.
One of the patrolmen glanced at him irritably. “Don’t make it worse, buddy,” he said.
The taxi driver shrugged, turned away and idly picked his teeth with a matchstick while the old man continued.