“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 Twelfth. 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:
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.”
“I used to see you at this little ring they have in Bensonhurst,” Corman told him. “With my brother.”
One eyebrow arched upward. “Your brother a fighter?”
Corman shook his head. “No. A gambler.”
Bowman’s mouth opened slightly. All his teeth were gone, but from the bluish look of his gums, Corman thought neglect had done more damage than the ring. As for his body, it was marvelously preserved, and Corman realized that in a photograph the shiny ebony skin would contrast nicely with the occasional scar, capture the perfect contradiction of vulnerable invincibility. “My brother always bet on you,” he said.
Bowman didn’t seem to believe him. “I couldn’t take the punishment,” he said. “You got to be able to take the punishment. Just being in the ring, it ain’t enough.”
“I guess.”
Bowman shrugged indifferently. “I got some posters, though,” he said. “I got ’em on my wall. Guys I fought, I got posters of them, too.” He shook his head disdainfully. “They never come to nothing. It’s like I tell people, you fight some guys, you can say you done it. But these palookas I come up against, they was a dime a dozen.” He tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “No mentality, you know. You can’t just fight with your hands.”
“Some of them didn’t look so bad,” Corman told him.
Bowman shrugged, unwilling to argue. “You a gambler, too?” he asked.
“No.”
“Some people say they ruined the game,” Bowman said. “Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. ’Cause in a way, betting is doing something. It ain’t just looking. Your brother fix ’em?”
“I don’t know,” Corman admitted. “He might have.”
“But you was never in on that?”
“No.”
“What do you do then?” Bowman asked quickly, firing questions now like short jabs.
“I take pictures.”
“Who for?”
“Nobody in particular,” Corman told him. “Newspapers sometimes.”
Bowman stared at him expressionlessly. “Pictures,” he repeated. “How come you doing that around here?”
“Somebody told me I should look up a guy who used to run this store,” Corman said. “He’s supposed to be Haitian. Got a French name.”
“Well, you’re looking for old Peletoux,” Bowman said. “But he ain’t here no more.”
“He moved?”
“God took him home,” Bowman answered crisply, without mourning. “Me and his wife… we was—you know —sort of close. She asked me to fill in for him, so I been here the last few weeks. You know, till she gets things settled. Then we’re leaving town.”
“I see.”
“How come you want pictures of old Peletoux?” Bowman asked with a short laugh. “He ain’t much to look at.”
“I heard he knew a lot about the neighborhood,” Corman said. “The people in it.”
“That’s what you want to take pictures of?” Bowman asked unbelievingly. “The people ’round here?”
“One person,” Corman said. “That woman who jumped out of her window last Thursday night.” He opened his camera bag, pulled out one of the photographs of the woman and handed it to him. “Early in the morning. About a block from here.”
