“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. The unlighted tenements and warehouses loomed larger, and seemed almost to bend toward the woman from above. Lang had disappeared from the frame, but the witness had not. He could still be seen standing in the right background, one hand in the air, talking excitedly to a figure who had been cut away.
The next five shots were in steadily tightening close-ups of the woman herself. The first had been taken only a few feet from her right side, and her long slender body stretched almost across the entire length of the frame. Her fingers seemed to curl around the right edge of the photograph, her feet to press back against its left wall.
The second concentrated on the face, the flattened nose held slightly up, the chin pressed against the rough street, the rain-soaked hair sprayed out in all directions, the puffy, half-opened right eye staring dazedly into the flat gray surface of the pavement.
The third had been taken from the opposite side. The face disappeared behind a curtain of drenched and matted hair, the legs severed at the ankles, her feet stretching beyond the edge of the frame. Her arm was now in full relief, and Corman could see the needle marks which ran up and down it, the cluster of raised purple dots which gathered like a tiny village in the pale valley of her elbow.
The fourth shot was from above. As he looked at it, Corman could easily tell how it had been taken. Shepherd had not used a ladder for this one. He had straddled the body at the waist, bent forward, set his line of vision, and pressed the button. To Shepherd, it must have seemed right at the time, a tight close-up, taken from directly overhead. But now it looked awkward, unsteady, oddly faked, the product of an urge to do more than record. It was as if, just for a moment, Shepherd had fallen victim to a different calling, decided to pump his picture up with a touch of drama, a pinch of trendy grief. He’d tried to find an angle that would weep a little, sputter into art, but he’d only gotten something that looked staged,“ as if the street had just been hosed by the technical crew, the rain blown by large fans shipped in from Hollywood, the woman about to get up, dry her hair and sprint to the waiting trailer for a line of coke.
The last photograph was taken from even further above the woman’s body. It was the one Corman had seen Shepherd take from the ladder. It showed almost the entire body. The head was in the foreground, with the trunk and legs stretching backward, like the stern of a boat shot from some position above the forward deck.
“Those yours?”
It was Grossbart, and Corman didn’t have to look up from the photograph to know it. Grossbart had a distinctive voice. It seemed to come from the ground.
“Shepherd’s,” Corman said. He slid the pictures over to Grossbart.
Grossbart looked at the photographs one by one, concentrating on each in turn. “Why’d he take this one?” he asked after a moment. “What’s he trying to do, impress his girlfriend?”
Corman glanced at the photograph. It was the one Shepherd had shot as he’d straddled the body. “He got carried away,” he said.
“I don’t like bullshit,” Grossbart said. He slid the photograph under the others. “Not much of a mystery,” he growled.
Corman pressed the tip of his cigarette into the small tin ashtray on the table. “She had a college diploma,” he said. “Barnes heard it was from Columbia.”
Grossbart was unimpressed. “So? Even smart people get depressed.”
“And the Similac,” Corman added. “She had cans of it. She was feeding it to the doll.”
Grossbart leaned forward very slightly. It was hardly perceptible, just a small inching toward the edge of the table.
“At the same time,” Corman told him pointedly, “she was starving.”
“How do you know?”
“The way she looked.”
“Hypes don’t put on much weight,” Grossbart said. “You know that.” Again there was the slight inching forward, a subtle, stalking movement, silent, cat-like. “What’s your point, Corman?”
Corman shrugged. “It’s interesting, that’s all.”