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.
“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.
