The City When It Rains (2 page)

T
HE RAIN WAS
falling heavily by the time Corman got to 47th Street. The photographer from the Crime Scene Unit was perched on a small portable ladder, his body bent forward, the camera pointed toward the woman. His name was Shepherd. Corman had seen him many times before, knew the old brown hat, pea-green raincoat, thick white socks, all now completely soaked in rain.

“Just finishing up,” Shepherd said dully as Corman stepped up to him. He aimed the camera steadily, seemed to freeze.

Watching him, Corman admired the care he took, the way he never let things distract him. He supposed the photographers of the old city had worked the same way, as if they'd had no lives outside, nothing to break their concentration, but only the darkness beneath the short black hood, the single tunnel of silver light. And yet, he thought, there was a dark flip side to such intense concentration, since focus shut out everything it didn't center on.

A bright flash swept the street as Shepherd shot the picture. Corman flinched, turned to the left and made his way toward the two men who slouched idly under a green cloth awning a few yards away.

The awning was badly tattered. Its torn flaps snapped softly in the breeze. It would make a marketable picture, had what Pike called “symbol potential.” In this case, urban decay. As Corman moved toward it, he could see that it only fitfully protected the two men from the hard, pelting rain.

“Lousy weather,” Santana said as Corman joined him under the awning.

Santana was a shooter for a lower Manhattan weekly who sometimes turned up at fire and crime scenes when things were slow in Soho or Tribeca. He was always friendly, almost jaunty, insensibly happy in the way birds seemed happy, along with other lower forms.

“It always rains on a street shoot,” Santana added. His skin was smooth and brown. He looked around thirty, but Corman had noticed that he liked to act the old pro, even when talking to men who'd been on hundreds of street shoots when the air had been bright, hot, dry, no rain in sight.

“Christ, look at that,” Santana said. He pointed to a cascading sheet of water that plunged from the top of a tenement to the street below. “Like fucking Niagara.”

“Yeah,” the other man said. His name was Fogarty, a shooter for a Brooklyn biweekly.

“You're late on this one, Corman,” Santana said after a moment. “The whole world's come and gone. What's the matter, you don't keep glued to the police frequency anymore?”

Corman's fingers reflexively moved to the radio handset which hung in a black holster from his belt. “I was taking a walk with my daughter.”

Santana waved his hand. “Well the ME's already been here. And Shepherd's the only guy left from CSU.” He shook his head. “He's taken a full roll already. God knows why.”

“He's got a morbid streak, that's why,” Fogarty said with a grim smile.

Santana looked at him doubtfully, the little black moustache twitching to the right.

“No lie,” Fogarty said firmly. “He hangs around like a fucking fly, sniffing, sniffing, rubbing his skinny little fingers together.” He did his standard imitation of a fly frantically raking its front legs. “Like that, you know?”

A single car swept by, throwing arcs of water from behind. Fogarty's eyes followed it, squinting slightly to see who was behind the wheel.

“Shepherd's a pro,” Santana said. “The way I hear it, first he shoots the hole, then the splinters on the floor.”

Fogarty faked a shiver.

Santana laughed. “You got a moral streak, Fogarty, a belief in humanity. I admire it.”

“Bullshit.”

Corman's eyes shifted back to Shepherd. He'd stepped off the ladder and was now breaking it down, getting ready to tuck it under his arm, return it to the CSU wagon. As he bent forward, small bursts of water leaped from the back of his coat, as if to strike at him was the whole secret purpose of the rain.

“A couple shooters rushed over right after the jump,” Santana told Corman. “One from the
News.
One from the
Post.
Some video cams, too. But nobody looked that excited.”

Corman looked at the woman, then the mound of blue blanket her naked arm seemed to be reaching for. “What happened?” he asked.

Fogarty's head drooped forward as he scratched his face. A line of moisture spread out from the brim of his hat. “Same old shit,” he said to Corman. “You been following the cop house long enough to know that.”

Corman's eyes returned to Shepherd. He was loading everything into the back of the CSU wagon. Two men lounged in its front seat, both of them smoking cigarettes. They had cracked the window slightly on the driver's side and a steady cloud of white smoke curled out of it.

“You got the field now,” Santana said to Corman, “but you'd better make it fast. The EMS boys'll scoop it up pretty soon.”

Corman looked at Fogarty.“Did you get an ID?”

Fogarty shook his head. “It's not my beat, Hell's Kitchen.”

Santana laughed. “He just came over because the wife's riding the pink pony, right, Artie?”

Fogarty glanced at Santana, winked. The two men laughed together, old comrades in the wars of love.

“Listen, Corman,” Santana said after the laughter had trailed off. “I hear Lazar died.”

“Not exactly.”

“Went to Florida, something like that?”

“He had a stroke,” Corman told him. “He's in a home up on 106th Street.”

“You two were real close, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Your rabbi. Taught you everything.”

Corman nodded quickly. “I'm going to take a few shots,” he said as he stepped out from under the awning, into the rain again.

The woman's body was sprawled across the smooth wet street. She wore a long white dress, but as the rotating lights of the EMS ambulance rhythmically pulsed over it, they turned it faintly orange. She lay face down, her body bent slightly at the waist. One of her arms pressed against her side. The other stretched out over her head, nearly perpendicular to her tangled hair, the fingers thrust out rigidly, so that they nearly touched a torn strand of the blue blanket. Her head was lifted, as if balanced on the tip of the chin, her face raised, despite the fact that her nose was crushed nearly flat. A trickle of blood ran from her ear, then moved in a gently curving line along her throat. In a standard black-and-white, it would look like a piece of soft black cord.

For a few seconds, Corman merely circled the body, looking for the best shot. Finally, he stopped just to the left of the woman's face and bent down to bring the top of her body into the frame. As he snapped the picture, the bright light of his flash swept over her like the tail of a comet, throwing her shadow across the slick gray pavement.

“You're wasting your time, Corman,” Santana said dryly as he passed by, heading for his car. “Even the locals'll pass on this.”

“Maybe.”

Santana nodded toward the blue blanket. “That's the only angle. And you ask me, it's not much.”

Corman glanced up at him. “Do they have any witnesses?”

Santana nodded in the opposite direction. “The Incorruptible Detective Lang dug one up,” he said facetiously. “He's still at him.”

Corman turned slowly to see the witness, a tall man in a New York Mets sweatshirt, as he talked to Lang just inside the doorway of a neighboring building.

Santana tapped Corman's shoulder. “Listen, could you spare me a sawbuck for a couple days?”

Corman stared him dead in the eye. “No.”

For an instant Santana looked offended, then his face relaxed into a light chuckle. “Well, at least you didn't give me some bullshit song and dance.” He laughed again, waved his hand. “Catch you later,” he said as he walked away.

Corrnan turned his attention to the bottom edge of the blue blanket. He knew that his second picture had caught the tip of it in the frame. It would be a distraction in the final print, drawing the viewer's eyes away from the woman, its real subject. It would confuse the composition, throw the frame off balance. He squatted close to the ground, edging the camera up just enough to take it out. The narrow wedge of blue sank beneath the bottom line of the frame like a small boat.

From that angle, he took several more pictures, drawing the camera down slightly, then to the right, up the woman's arm. A line of needle marks ran from the upper arm to the elbow, where they gathered in a cluster of pitted purple dots. Several tan scars, raised and pointed, crisscrossed the same area like tiny mountain ranges. He moved the camera on down along the nearly smooth lower arm until he reached her fingers. Her nails had once been painted bright green, but most of the polish had chipped away. He shot one of her hands, centering the frame around a single jaggedly outstretched finger.

It was pointing toward the blue blanket and the small doll that lay wrapped inside it. For a few seconds, Corman concentrated on the doll's face, the glittering plastic eyes that stared up at the overhanging building, the dirty white stain gathered in its mouth.

Inside the blanket, the doll was naked, with rounded arms and large, bulging stomach. The head was scrunched down into the fleshy folds of its neck so that from a certain angle, it looked like a miniature sumo wrestler.

But that wasn't the angle Corman liked. He circled the body slowly, as he had the woman's, staring at it through the lens, trying to find an appropriate frame. Every picture has a heart, Lazar had once told him, it's the shooter's job to find it.

Corman finally decided to shoot the doll from the left side, with most of the body covered by the blanket, then straight down, with the face just enough off center to pick up the glistening pavement.

After he'd taken several shots, he straightened himself, let his eyes drift back and forth from the woman to the doll, as if following a length of rope which stretched from one to the other.

“Some fucking night,” Lang said as he stepped up beside him.“Raining like hell, and I get a jumper.”

Corman nodded.

“You get all the pictures you need?”

“I guess.”

“Good,” Lang said. He headed toward the tenement.

“If you're going in, I'd like to take a look,” Corman said.

Lang studied him for a moment. “Okay,” he said finally.

Corman walked a few paces behind him, watching Lang's back. He thought about snapping a quick picture, concentrating on the dripping hat, the fall of his shoulders, the way the tenement walls drew in around him so that he looked like a man walking into a dark concrete trap. But it was a picture he'd seen a thousand times. No matter what the angle, it always came out on the side of hopelessness. Give up the fight was its advice.

A narrow alley led along the southern wall of the building. Lang trudged down it listlessly, his feet scraping through the usual debris, cans, bottles, bits of paper, until he got to a rectangular flap of unpainted plywood that leaned against the side of the building. Then he jerked it down and let it crash into the alley.

The hole behind it was barely large enough to crawl through. Lang took a flashlight from his raincoat, stooped down with a low groan, and crawled on his hands and knees through the opening.

Corman came in behind him, feeling the ground carefully for nails, broken glass, old hypodermic needles. Inside, it was dark, the windows completely covered over, and as he rose to his feet, Corman could see nothing but the single yellow beam from Lang's flashlight as it glided smoothly along the floor of the building. The walls were wet, peeling, the ceiling pulled down, its plumbing stripped away. The floor was bare, swept clean, except for the far left corner, where the light grew more faded and diffused, and settled finally on a small pile of empty cans.

Corman walked over to the cans and stared down at them. “Similac,” he said. He looked at Lang. “Baby formula.” He fingered the strap of his camera bag as he thought of the stain on the doll's mouth. “She was feeding it.”

“Yeah,” Lang said without interest, peering about. “There must be a set of stairs around here.” He walked to the middle of the room, his feet scraping through the broken pieces of plaster and sheetrock which covered it. Then he stopped, pointed the flashlight toward the far rear corner. Metal stairs led upward to the second floor. “There we are,” he said idly as he headed for them.

Corman followed him up the stairs until they reached the top floor of the building.

“The witness said the jumper had been living here for quite a while,” Lang said as he made his way to the window. “He said she threw the doll out first. Like trash, he said. Then she jumped herself.” He glanced quickly out the window, then turned back toward the dark room and headed for the stairs.

Corman stepped up to the window and peered out. Two ambulance attendants were moving toward the body. One of them had a zippered plastic body bag slung over his shoulder like a slick black pelt.

Corman lifted the camera to his eye and moved it slowly over the scene below, concentrating on the two bodies, his lens cruising smoothly from the plump plastic one wrapped in a blue blanket to the emaciated legs of the woman in the white dress. In the faintly silver street light, her skin took on a slick, scaly sheen. It was the high gloss of starvation, and he'd seen it only in pictures before. He stepped away from the window, quickly grasped a shattered edge of jutting brick, and held on for a moment while he put it together in his mind. Then he snapped the lens cap back on his camera and headed for the stairs, finally catching up with Lang in the alleyway.

“She was starving,” he told him.

Lang kept up his pace. “It happens.”

“But she bought all that Similac.”

“So?”

“For a doll.”

Lang continued on until he reached his car. Then he opened the door, slid in, glanced back at Corman through the half-open window. “Keep an eye to your back,” he warned. “It's always more dangerous than you think.”