“Call me Dominic, pop,” the driver said with a laugh.
One of the patrolmen glanced at him irritably. “Don’t make it worse, buddy,” he said.
The taxi driver shrugged, turned away and idly picked his teeth with a matchstick while the old man continued.
“As I was saying, I know the ordinances,” the old man began again, “but that doesn’t mean that I want to be treated special. But when it rains, I’m like a great many people. I want a cab.” He brushed his nose quickly with his hand, and Corman noticed that he held a leather strap. He followed it downward to where a large seeing-eye dog sat calmly on the sidewalk, its large pink tongue hanging limply from its mouth.
“This man refused to take me,” the old man cried with a sudden, wrenching vehemence. “Refused to accept me as a passenger.”
The driver’s eyes shot over to him. “Not you, pal,” he said. “The dog. I don’t take no animals in my cab.”
“This is a trained dog,” the old man shouted. His finger wagged in the air. Corman focused on it and shot.
The driver waved at the finger dismissively. “Yeah, well a trained dog gets fleas and shit just like any other dog.”
The old man’s face lifted in offense. “This dog does not have fleas, sir,” he declared.
The driver’s face tightened. “How the fuck do you know? You couldn’t fucking see them if it did!”
The old man’s body stiffened. He seemed on the verge of lunging toward the driver. “I was blinded by the Japanese, sir,” he screamed. “On an island called Iwo Jima. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it.”
The driver laughed. “I seen the movie with John Wayne,” he said. Then he winked good-humoredly at the crowd, which only stared back at him resentfully.
“Yes, well I was not with John Wayne, sir,” the old man fired back. “I wasn’t making movies. I was protecting this country!”
“All right, all right,” one of the patrolmen said. “Let’s everybody calm down here, okay? Let’s just everybody cool it.”
The second patrolman moved closer to the driver, motioned him forward, then whispered something into his ear.
The old man drew in a deep breath. “Anyway,” he said, “I asked this gentleman …” His hand swept out, 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 schmeer. So I asked myself, ‘Christ, what happened?’ On my own time, I started checking around. Nothing. Then the ME’s report came in. Turns out the woman had a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. The guy at the morgue, he even showed it to me. A little black ball, nothing. I looked at that thing, and I said to myself, ‘There’s the murderer.’” He lifted his hands, palms up, fingers spread. “Simple.”