The City When It Rains

service revolver, calls the goddamn dog, says, ‘Here, boy, here, boy,’ and pats his fucking leg.” He took a puff on the cigar. “The dog turns, starts coming toward the Jake, still barking and snarling and shit. My guy’s beginning to get a little ill at ease, but he knows he can’t run from the son-of-a-bitch, not a cop, not a cop in uniform, not from a goddamn dog. So, well, worse comes to worse, and he plugs it. Puts a bullet right in its face. A patrol car shows up right away, and they hustle the rookie into the back seat. Puff, up comes a shooter. Like a genie out of a fucking bottle. He says he wants to take a picture. He says it’s for his own private collection. He takes a shot of the rookie and the next day it’s on the front page of the News. The rookie has his hands in his face. He looks fucking pitiful. The caption says, DOG TIRED.” Lang laughed edgily and leaned forward. “So what I want to know is, how you going to screw me with this angle you’re working on?”

“I’m interested in the woman,” Corman said. “That’s all.”

“You got a problem with anything else?”

“No.”

“You think I fucked up anything?”

“Not that I saw.”

Lang watched him a moment longer, then relaxed slightly. “Okay,” he said finally. “Who knows, maybe you can do me a favor sometime. What do you want to see?”

“Whatever you picked up in the building.”

Lang shrugged. “Well, we bagged a few items that night,” he said, “but everything else got tossed by the landlord. He had some guys come in and sweep everything out. I guess he wanted to seal it up before some other squatter set up housekeeping.”

“There was still stuff there,” Corman told him.

“Yeah?” Lang said. “How do you know?”

“I went over there.”

“You went inside?”

Corman nodded.

“Find anything?”

Corman thought a moment then decided to tell the truth. “A button.”

Lang laughed. “A button?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we did better than that,” Lang said. He stood up and waved Corman alongside him. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Corman followed him downstairs, then into the basement, and finally, through a long, dusty corridor, to a small room in the north corner of the building. The walls were unpainted gray cinder blocks, and overhead, Corman could see the exposed underbelly of the building itself, pipes, electrical cables, the large wooden crossbeams which supported everything.

“If it’s not a mystery,” Lang said, “we keep everything down here, unless somebody claims it.”

“And no one has?”

Lang smiled. ‘Well, we’re not exactly talking about the Queen’s jewels.” He walked to a large metal filing cabinet, pulled out the drawer, and from it, a single manila envelope. “There you have it,” he said as he handed it to Corman. “Her net worth.”

Corman took the envelope over to a small wooden desk, sat down and stared at the name: SARAH JUDITH ROSEN. “Where’s the diploma?” he asked.

“In the envelope,” Lang said. He stepped to the door. “Just be sure to turn out the lights when you’re through in here,” he added as he left the room.

Corman opened the envelope and scattered its contents across the desk. They were only a few items: a rusty nail file, a compact with a cracked mirror, a pack of matches with two left in place, a small pacifier and a baby rattle shaped like a fat clown. There was an oval rubber change purse, the sort that opened up like a small toothless mouth when the ends are pressed together. Crumpled inside, Corman found a receipt from a blood bank operation on the Bowery.

The diploma was in a teakwood frame. The glass was cracked, and one corner of the frame was splintered. It had awarded Sarah Rosen a bachelor of arts degree in 1988.

Everything else had been inventoried on a police property form, then discarded. The form itself had been folded three times and inserted into the manila envelope. Item by item, it listed the rest of Rosen’s worldly goods: a set of toy blocks, along with a plastic pail and shovel, a few infant sleeping suits, one dress, two pairs of jeans, one belt, three pairs of panties, a washcloth and two towels, a pair of sandals, a terry cloth robe, and three dollars and seventy-three cents in cash. There was a notation at the bottom of the list. It said officially what Lang had already told him, that sometime on Saturday the landlord had had the building swept clean of everything else.

Corman let the paper slip from his hand. It fell onto the table, one of its sharp corners piercing the center of the articles spread out around it. It had fallen into an unexpectedly dramatic position, each article at precisely the right angle to another. Corman quickly took out his camera and photographed it. With the right exposure, it would have a sad, haunting quality, perhaps end up as the final picture in Julian’s book, stark, graphic, lonely, a life reduced to what it had left behind … and he hadn’t had to move a single thing.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

CORMAN ARRIVED at Bellevue a few minutes before Sarah Rosen’s body was due to be picked up. It was a massive building, bulky, the sort that always looked overfed. The old city had built it while still reeling in the aftershock of yellow fever, and as he stood at the top of its long line of stairs, it was easy for Corman to imagine the final days of the Yellow Jack Plague, the street cries of “Bring out your dead,” the way the people had wrapped the bodies symbolically in yellow sheets before tossing them onto the open lorries that took them to the common burial pit that had been dug at Washington Square. The plague had lasted for many months, and Lazar had often spoken of it, the empty streets and deserted houses, the stricken, feverish looters who’d staggered through the countless abandoned shops, sometimes dying in them, faceup on the floor, their arms still filled with plunder. Only the illustrators of the period had truly flourished, sketching the disaster one line at a time.

Kellerman glanced up as Corman came into his office. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” he said.

“I’m here,” Corman answered.

“As far as I know, everything’s set,” Kellerman told him. “You ready?”

Corman nodded, his mind considering Julian’s idea once again: slow decline, incremental fall. “Has anyone else come around to see her?” he asked. “Called to ask about her, anything?”

Kellerman shook his head. “No.”

“Father, mother, anyone from her family?”

“Nope,” Kellerman repeated, then led Corman into the building, briskly escorting him down the corridor to his office.

Once behind his desk, Kellerman started in on the morning mail. “By the way,” he said, slicing open one envelope after another. “How do you want to do this? I mean, if any relatives show up, I don’t want them to be disturbed.”

“I can shoot from pretty far away,” Corman told him.

“Far enough so they wouldn’t even see you?”

“Maybe,” Corman said. “Where does the hearse pick them up?”

“Back driveway.”

“I could set up from across the lot,” Corman said. “I don’t think anybody would even know I was there.”

Kellerman looked relieved. “That sounds good. Why don’t you go ahead and get into position? If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

Corman walked down the corridor and out into the back lot of the building. An ambulance, orange-striped, with Hebrew lettering across the side, was parked not far away. He stationed himself just behind its rear doors, pulled out his camera, changed the lenses for the shoot, then panned to the right. At the far end of the building, he could see the doors of the Emergency Ward. In the old city, horse-drawn ambulances had raced up to them from