Once above ground, Corman hoisted his bag more securely onto his shoulder and headed south, moving quickly until he reached police headquarters.
One Police Plaza was a massive brick cube which sat like a huge red block between Chinatown and the East River. Its straight parallel lines of small square windows made it look exactly like what it represented, the inflexible authority of the law. The old police headquarters had been very different, a beautiful beaux arts building, domed, graceful, as aristocratic in appearance as some of the old chiefs had been aristocratic by birth. The developers of the new city had already turned it into a luxury condominium.
The police darkroom and photographic laboratory was in the basement of the building. Its dark green double doors faced a well-lighted corridor which was usually filled with the familiar smells of photographic work.
Charlie Barnes was sitting at his desk when Corman came into the room. Long black strips of negatives were lined up in front of him, each neatly numbered with a red grease pencil. Harvey Grossbart stood over him, peering at the negatives. “That one,” he said.
Barnes marked it, then glanced over to Corman. “You look like hell.”
Corman shrugged, said nothing.
“Lang would like something like that,” Grossbart said as he pointed to a particularly gruesome picture.
Barnes shook his head in disgust. “He stinks to high heaven, Lang does. I’d bet my life savings he’s on the pad, a big one too, a horse couldn’t swallow it.”
Grossbart shook his head. “Not in Homicide. There’s no money in Homicide.”
“Just what you can snatch from the room of the recently deceased, right?” Barnes asked with a smile.
Grossbart looked at him tensely. “You wired, Charlie? You got an IAD wire up your ass?”
Barnes laughed.
Grossbart leaned toward him slightly. “Because if you do, I’ll tell you every fucking thing I know.”
Barnes laughed again, this time a little nervously. Then he took a single photograph from the stack on his desk. “Here’s a good one from that hotel killing.”
Grossbart took the picture and lifted it slightly for better light.
“You showed up for that one, didn’t you, Corman?” Barnes asked.
“Yes,” Corman said. He stepped over and looked at the photograph.
It showed a woman lying facedown on a bed, naked from the waist up, the lower part of her body wrapped in a dark brown towel. A large red bra hung from one of the bedposts. Over the other one, a man’s hat, an old gray homburg, was tipped, almost jauntily. The woman stretched across the full length of the bed, her brown feet near the headboard, her hair pouring over the end of the bed like a wash of brackish gray water. She was somewhat overweight. Rounded folds of skin hung from her sides, tan and doughy.
From the photograph, it was easy to tell what had happened to her. Her husband had pressed her face into the mattress, probably to muffle her screams. Then, for some reason Corman could not imagine, he’d swept her hair over the top of her head before nosing the barrel of the pistol into the fleshy hollow at the base of her skull.
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. Slow decline. Incremental fall. “Diploma?” he asked.
“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.