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 ri
ght. 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.
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 Twel
fth. 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.”