reaching for something. “This gentleman …”
A man in jogging clothes leaned his shoulder into the searching hand. “When the cabbie refused to take him, he asked me to get the cabbie’s license number,” he said to the patrolmen. “And when the cabbie saw me doing that, he started cursing me.”
The driver turned away again, his eyes moving along a line of small square windows across the street. “I used to take them in, the blind people,” he told the second patrolman, “but I always ended up with fleas all over the car. It’s like every time I picked one of these people up, it cost me twenty bucks to fumigate the fucking cab.”
His eyes turned from the patrolmen and began to search the crowd imploringly. “Can you blame me? Huh?” he asked. “What would you do in my place?” He looked directly into Corman’s camera, his eyes narrowing intently. “What would you do in my place?” he demanded. For a moment he stared fiercely at the camera. Then, suddenly, his whole body slumped back against the cab, as if defeated, and as he did so, Corman felt his sympathies shift miraculously toward him and away from the old man. It had happened in an instant, so that Corman recognized the shift must have come from some separate quarter of existence that lay beyond the teachable forms of right and wrong, a world of ancient traces, basic as the primordial ooze.
It made him think of Sarah Rosen, the way her body had been starved down to its glistening fundamentals, perhaps even in the way her mind had finally come to concentrate with a single, sacrificial intensity on the ancient devotion of her motherhood. For an instant, he could see her standing at the tenement window, her white arms wrapped around the blue-eyed doll, her eyes fixed on the unrelenting rain, her body trembling like the prophet’s robe. The air seemed to chill around him, as if a wintry blast had unexpectedly swept through the city, and he felt himself ease back into the crowd, away from Sarah and her ledge, toward a safer place, where the purest urges were seeded with protective dross, the stars were fixed, lakes had bottoms, and things fell back to earth because they had to.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
“DO YOU THINK she had to?” Corman asked. He still felt oddly shaky, as if the sudden shift in his sympathies had rocked his own foundations.
Grossbart looked at him questioningly. “What are you asking?”
“About the woman, the one who went out the window.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet me?” Grossbart asked. “The woman?”
“Just to talk about her,” Corman said. Only a few weeks before, it would have been Lazar across from him now, the calm face watching him in the shadowy light of some bar in the Village.
Grossbart glanced out the window of the pizzeria. The heat from the ovens had misted the glass, but people could still be seen hurrying across Sixth Avenue, most of them headed for a place that sold safari clothes and had a stuffed rhinoceros in the window. “What have you found out about her?” he asked when he looked back at Corman.
“Nothing much,” Corman said. “They picked up her body today. I took some pictures.”
“Pictures? Why?”
“Something I’m working on.”
Grossbart looked at him pointedly. “Have you come up with anything?”
Corman shook his head. “Not much.”
Grossbart looked at the wedge of pizza which was turning cold on Corman’s plate. “You going to eat that?” he asked.
“No.”
“Mind if I do?”
Corman slid the paper plate across the table toward him.
Grossbart took a small bite of the pizza, grimaced. “Jesus.”
“It’s never good here,” Corman said.
Grossbart let the piece slide lifelessly back onto the plate and wiped his fingers with a napkin. “I heard about the button,” he said. He shook his head. “But you got to understand something, Corman. Something like that, all it does is make you look like some kind of hot-shot amateur detective. And, between me and you, that’s not the way to impress the people downtown, or the guys on the beat. They work with pros.” The napkin shot up to his mouth and wiped the grease from the lips. “Besides, that button stuff, that’s bullshit. She could have pulled it off. It could have fallen off. Christ, anything.”
“It seemed strange,” Corman said.
“I know the feeling,” Grossbart said. “But in this case, my guess is a lot of things went haywire for this girl. Simple as that.” He turned to the window, wiped a path through the mist with the sleeve of his jacket and pointed eastward. “When I was a rookie, a woman over there in Brooklyn killed her two sons.” His eyes flashed back to Corman. “Seven and four, that’s how old they were. This woman, she found the tallest building in Brooklyn. Now at that time, there weren’t that many tall buildings in Brooklyn, but she found the tallest one, and don’t ask me how, but she got to the top of it, and one by one she dropped the two boys off, then went off herself.” He leaned back in his seat, nodded toward the pizza. “At the bottom of the building, they looked like that, all three of them.” He glanced back up at Corman and stared at him intently. “She was a middle-class woman, a good Catholic, happily married as far as we could find out, the whole
Corman shook his head doubtfully. “Sarah Rosen didn’t have a brain tumor.”
“Well, there’s all kinds of people, Corman,” Grossbart said. “Some are lucky. That’s just the way it is. Others, it’s like they’re made up of some different kind of substance. Velcro, something like that. Trouble sticks to them.” He smiled. “Just petty stuff sometimes. When they’re on the ramp, the fucking train takes forever.”
“It would take a lot of trouble for someone to end up like she did,” Corman said.
“Some people are born drowning,” Grossbart said. “They bob around a little, gasp for air, but basically, they’re drowning.”
Corman leaned forward. “If I were trying to run down the story of this woman, where would I begin, Harvey?” he asked. “Like I told you back at Number One, I’m new at this. I could use a few tips.”
Grossbart shrugged. “Well, you could start with the neighborhood.”
“I did that. They’re all illegals. They won’t talk about anything.”
“Didn’t Lang have a guy?”
Corman shook his head. “He thinks I’m a millionaire, hit me up for money.”
“Which you don’t have much of, I take it,” Grossbart said.
Corman wondered what it was that made him look so strapped, and realized that if Grossbart had noticed it at all, then Lexie would see it written across his face in bright, pulsing neon.
Grossbart pulled himself to his feet. “Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. You’re working a case now, so you learn how it is. Either you get something direct, or you stumble on to a new lead, or … you just come up a crapper.”
“I can’t do that,” Corman said, surprised by the edge of desperation he heard in his own voice.
Grossbart looked at him a moment, then took the napkin from the table and unnecessarily wiped his fingers again. “You know what I say, Corman, not just to you, to everybody. I say, ‘Hey, you looking for a mystery, some big tragedy? Look in the fucking mirror.’” He smiled thinly and let the napkin float back to the table. “Nobody has to go any further than that.”
Corman smiled tentatively and thought of Lucy. “I do,” he said.
CHAPTER
