The City When It Rains (10 page)

The police 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 seascapes, 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 second shot was a little closer. Now the woman's body stretched further across the rain-slick street. The tires of the ambulance could be seen a few feet away from her outstretched arm, but the rest of it was open, the white and orange body, the flashing hoodlights, the two attendants who leaned against the already open rear door. The unlighted tenements and warehouses loomed larger, and seemed almost to bend toward the woman from above. Lang had disappeared from the frame, but the witness had not. He could still be seen standing in the right background, one hand in the air, talking excitedly to a figure who had been cut away.

The next five shots were in steadily tightening close-ups of the woman herself. The first had been taken only a few feet from her right side, and her long slender body stretched almost across the entire length of the frame. Her fingers seemed to curl around the right edge of the photograph, her feet to press back against its left wall.

The second concentrated on the face, the flattened nose held slightly up, the chin pressed against the rough street, the rain-soaked hair sprayed out in all directions, the puffy, half-opened right eye staring dazedly into the flat gray surface of the pavement.

The third had been taken from the opposite side. The face disappeared behind a curtain of drenched and matted hair, the legs severed at the ankles, her feet stretching beyond the edge of the frame. Her arm was now in full relief, and Corman could see the needle marks which ran up and down it, the cluster of raised purple dots which gathered like a tiny village in the pale valley of her elbow.

The fourth shot was from above. As he looked at it, Corman could easily tell how it had been taken. Shepherd had not used a ladder for this one. He had straddled the body at the waist, bent forward, set his line of vision, and pressed the button. To Shepherd, it must have seemed right at the time, a tight close-up, taken from directly overhead. But now it looked awkward, unsteady, oddly faked, the product of an urge to do more than record. It was as if, just for a moment, Shepherd had fallen victim to a different calling, decided to pump his picture up with a touch of drama, a pinch of trendy grief. He'd tried to find an angle that would weep a little, sputter into art, but he'd only gotten something that looked staged,“ as if the street had just been hosed by the technical crew, the rain blown by large fans shipped in from Hollywood, the woman about to get up, dry her hair and sprint to the waiting trailer for a line of coke.

The last photograph was taken from even further above the woman's body. It was the one Corman had seen Shepherd take from the ladder. It showed almost the entire body. The head was in the foreground, with the trunk and legs stretching backward, like the stern of a boat shot from some position above the forward deck.

“Those yours?”

It was Grossbart, and Corman didn't have to look up from the photograph to know it. Grossbart had a distinctive voice. It seemed to come from the ground.

“Shepherd's,” Corman said. He slid the pictures over to Grossbart.

Grossbart looked at the photographs one by one, concentrating on each in turn. “Why'd he take this one?” he asked after a moment. “What's he trying to do, impress his girlfriend?”

Corman glanced at the photograph. It was the one Shepherd had shot as he'd straddled the body. “He got carried away,” he said.

“I don't like bullshit,” Grossbart said. He slid the photograph under the others. “Not much of a mystery,” he growled.

Corman pressed the tip of his cigarette into the small tin ashtray on the table. “She had a college diploma,” he said. “Barnes heard it was from Columbia.”