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.”
CHAPTER
THREE
ON THE WAY BACK to his apartment, Corman stopped off at Smith’s Bar on Eighth Avenue. The usual customers had already assumed their usual places, and from his own seat at the end of the bar he could follow the action as closely as he liked. For a time, he’d thought of doing some sort of photographic study of the burned-out cases who hung around late at night, retired cops, street hustlers, drifters, vagrants, barflies, the usual spillover from the slum hotels. They had hard, weathered faces, but in pictures that only made them look like characters from central casting, actors in some docudrama about the wretched of the earth. Through the generations, they’d been gone over by the best of them. The illustrators of the old city had done them in woodcuts, charcoal, and after the illustrators, legions of shooters had poured into the slums, shantytowns and ghettos. He’d gone over hundreds of their pictures for his book, everything from the groggeries of the Five Points to the murderous alleyways of the Old Brewery. He’d seen children buried waist-high in garbage heaps, piles of women sleeping in open wagons, swollen bodies left for days in unlit corridors and abandoned airshafts.
“What’ll you have, Corman?” Mike asked as he wiped the bar and put down the little paper mat. “The usual?”
“Yeah.”
Mike smiled, poured the shot of J&B. “How you been?”
“Okay.”
“Long night?”
“A jumper,” Corman said. He downed the shot, glanced to the left. A nearly bald, middle-aged man was whispering vehemently to himself, his hand pressed against his face.
“Been like that all night,” Mike said, “Somebody must have opened up one of those fruit bins upstate, let ’em loose.”
Corman took out a cigarette and lit it. “They used to put them on a boat,” he said idly. “Then they just sent them drifting down the river. You know, the ship of fools.”
Mike chuckled. “Put them on a boat, huh? Where was this, Poughkeepsie?”
Suddenly, the bald man peeped out from behind his own hand. “Animal cages have been recommended,” he blurted loudly in a high, staccato voice. Then he fled back behind his tightly closed fingers and began giggling wildly.
Mike shook his head, picked up a glass and began polishing it. “You remember that redhead in here couple nights ago?”
Corman didn’t.
“Flaming red hair,” Mike added. “Big hooters.”
Corman saw her now, the long red hair dangling from her shoulders, the way she plucked at her lower lip while Mike did his best number on her, the one about his days as a big band singer.
Mike winked. “One of Mike’s Girls now,” he said. “Number one sixty-two.” He laughed. “I told her so. After, I mean. While we were both having a smoke. About the count. She thought it was funny.” He shrugged. “Least it didn’t bother her.”
Corman glanced at the empty glass. “One more.”
Mike was still pouring it when the bald man shot his face out from behind his hand again.
“Elephant-size capacity,” he said loudly, then swiftly retreated behind his hand.
“He means cages, I guess,” Mike said. “The ones they recommended.” He filled Corman’s glass, chuckled to himself. “Yeah, she laughed when I told her, the redhead. A real good sport, you know?” He shook his head. “If it weren’t for the ladies, what would life be, huh?” He was probably in his early fifties, but well kept, With slick black hair and an aging matinee idol face. His eyes were light blue, and Corman could easily imagine them as two small cold lights in the afterglow of passion, distant, calculating, already looking for the next hit.
“She was a real dish, I’ll say that for her,” Mike said. “Definitely worth the strokes.”
Corman’s mind shifted to the jumper, her wet, glistening skin. “Did you ever see a woman around here?” he asked. “Skinny, carrying a doll in a blanket?”
Mike took up another glass and began polishing it while the younger bartender worked the other half of the bar. “Don’t sound like one of Mike’s Girls,” he said.
“The jumper only lived a few blocks from here,” Corman said. “I thought you might have seen her pass the window.”
Mike shook his head. “Just sounds like another escapee from Looneyville, you ask me.”
“Maybe,” Corman said. He thought of the empty cans of Similac, the white stains around the doll’s mouth, and regretted he hadn’t gotten closer to them, concentrated on the way the rain had frothed them out from the rubbery pink lips.
Back at the apartment, Corman pulled out the sleeper sofa and prepared to bed down, as he always did, in the middle of the living room. It was an old sofa, dark green and rather soiled. It was the first thing he and Lexie had bought after getting married, and each time he pulled it out, something of those vanished days swept over him in a soft invisible tide.
Someone knocked at the door just as he was about to undress. He walked to the door and opened it.
Mrs. Donaldson stood in the doorway, erect as her aging bones could keep her. She was a large woman with an almost perfectly round head. Her white hair shone like an aura around her pink face. I It gave her a strangely unreal look, as if she were someone’s fairy godmother and could change things with a wand.
“I was wondering if you were home yet,” she said. There was a faintly accusatory edge in her voice, which made Corman uncomfortable. It was in her eyes too, and it made him see himself as he thought she saw him, aloof, roguish, a man who could ditch his children whenever the mood struck him.
“I came home earlier,” he told her. “But then I had to go out again. I had a shoot.”
“Lucy was here alone,” Mrs. Donaldson said.
“She has to be, sometimes.”
Mrs. Donaldson eyed him pointedly. “There’ve been a few break-ins, you know,” she said.
“There’re always a few break-ins.”
“On the third floor,” Mrs. Donaldson added significantly. “Just under us. Mr. Baxter’s apartment. They got
