He felt a wave of anger pass over him and fired a few questions back at her. Why did you leave her? What about Jeffrey and his millions? What about crawling into the nearest lifeboat, money? What about the great feminist now comfortably ensconced beneath Jeffrey’s rich umbrella, thinking nothing, doing nothing except maybe casting a lustful eye toward the pool man once in a while?
He shook his head. His bitterness amazed him. And his unfairness. Rage reshaped the world according to its own wounded angles. He drew in a long, deep breath, like a diver trying for the bottom again, reaching for some impossible treasure, something he could bring up from the depths and hand to Lexie on the gleaming beach: Look what I found for Lucy.
He started down the steps, then stopped again, thinking of his father. Luther Corman. What a prize. He could imagine him in court, testifying for Lexie, answering her lawyer’s final question: Now, Mr. Corman, in light of your experience with your son, do you think he should retain custody of your granddaughter? He could see that unctuous, stricken face staring directly at the judge, tragic, mournful, Old Agrippa in a Brooks Brothers suit: Regrettably, no. He would say it just like that. Regrettably, no. And the judge would feel such pity for him. How could such a dignified and accomplished man have such an immature, wastrel son? Dignified? What about all those smarmy end-runs around the IRS? Accomplished? At what, besides sobriety and, as far as Corman knew, marital fidelity? As a father, he’d hardly existed at all. Lexie had immediately recognized that. “He’s like Neptune,” she’d once said. “When you reach out to touch him he dissolves.” But even in this, Corman thought now, Lexie had been a little off. It wasn’t that his father had dissolved, but that there’d never been anything there in the first place.
Again, he shook his head silently, stunned by his own anger, and wondered if perhaps it was the only emotion he knew all the way down to its appalling core.
Corman found Milo Sax exactly where he expected to, feeding a group of bickering pigeons in Hell’s Kitchen Park. Lazar had introduced them several years before, when Sax had still been working for the News. At that time, Pike had been anticipating an offer from the Washington Post and had started grooming Milo as his replacement, but Sax had blown it with a thoughtless reference to the fact that Pike’s oldest son had been living with a roommate on Christopher Street for a little too long than was altogether natural. “If my son was a fag, I’d damn well know it,” Pike had snapped back, cutting the line of succession in one quick slice. Sax had hung on as a steady shooter for a while after that, but the persona non grata status had finally worn him down, and he’d gone free-lance for a time, then drifted into idleness. Now, at forty-four, he already seemed old and slightly senile, as if, when he’d hung up his camera, he’d handed over part of his mind as well. He had a small apartment on 47th Street where he continued to live off the dwindling resources the last beats of an ancient trust fund were still able to pump into his hands. It was dank and smelly, and whenever the weather wasn’t too wet or cold, Sax usually headed for the park.
“Hello, Milo,” Corman said as he sat down on the bench beside him.
Sax arced a fistful of seed over the heads of the pigeons and watched them scurry toward it, gurgling loudly and flapping their wings. “First time I’ve been able to get out here in a couple days,” he said. “The rain’s been locking me in.”
Corman nodded.
Milo turned toward him. “I heard about Lazar. Best there ever was, Corman. You see him much?”
“I go up when I can.”
“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: And when I was a little girl, I used to buy candy in this shop on our block. There was always a man behind the counter, but I can’t remember what he looked like.
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.