The City When It Rains Read Free Page B

The walls were wet, peeling, the ceiling pulled down, its plumbing stripped away. The floor was bare, swept clean, except for the far left corner, where the light grew more faded and diffused, and settled finally on a small pile of empty cans.
    Corman walked over to the cans and stared down at them. “Similac,” he said. He looked at Lang. “Baby formula.” He fingered the strap of his camera bag as he thought of the stain on the doll’s mouth. “She was feeding it.”
    â€œYeah,” Lang said without interest, peering about. “There must be a set of stairs around here.” He walked to the middle of the room, his feet scraping through the broken pieces of plaster and sheetrock which covered it. Then he stopped, pointed the flashlight toward the far rear corner. Metal stairs led upward to the second floor. “There we are,” he said idly as he headed for them.
    Corman followed him up the stairs until they reached the top floor of the building.
    â€œThe witness said the jumper had been living here for quite a while,” Lang said as he made his way to the window. “He said she threw the doll out first. Like trash, he said. Then she jumped herself.” He glanced quickly out the window, then turned back toward the dark room and headed for the stairs.
    Corman stepped up to the window and peered out. Two ambulance attendants were moving toward the body. One of them had a zippered plastic body bag slung over his shoulder like a slick black pelt.
    Corman lifted the camera to his eye and moved it slowly over the scene below, concentrating on the two bodies, his lens cruising smoothly from the plump plastic one wrapped in a blue blanket to the emaciated legs of the woman in the white dress. In the faintly silver street light, her skin took on a slick, scaly sheen. It was the high gloss of starvation, and he’d seen it only in pictures before. He stepped away from the window, quickly grasped a shattered edge of jutting brick, and held on for a moment while he put it together in his mind. Then he snapped the lens cap back on his camera and headed for the stairs, finally catching up with Lang in the alleyway.
    â€œShe was starving,” he told him.
    Lang kept up his pace. “It happens.”
    â€œBut she bought all that Similac.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œFor a doll.”
    Lang continued on until he reached his car. Then he opened the door, slid in, glanced back at Corman through the half-open window. “Keep an eye to your back,” he warned. “It’s always more dangerous than you think.”

CHAPTER
THREE
    O N THE WAY BACK to his apartment, Corman stopped off at Smith’s Bar on Eighth Avenue. The usual customers had already assumed their usual places, and from his own seat at the end of the bar he could follow the action as closely as he liked. For a time, he’d thought of doing some sort of photographic study of the burned-out cases who hung around late at night, retired cops, street hustlers, drifters, vagrants, barflies, the usual spillover from the slum hotels. They had hard, weathered faces, but in pictures that only made them look like characters from central casting, actors in some docudrama about the wretched of the earth. Through the generations, they’d been gone over by the best of them. The illustrators of the old city had done them in woodcuts, charcoal, and after the illustrators, legions of shooters had poured into the slums, shantytowns and ghettos. He’d gone over hundreds of their pictures for his book, everything from the groggeries of the Five Points to the murderous alleyways of the Old Brewery. He’d seen children buried waist-high in garbage heaps, piles of women sleeping in open wagons, swollen bodies left for days in unlit corridors and abandoned airshafts.
    â€œWhat’ll you have, Corman?” Mike asked as he wiped the bar and put down the little paper mat. “The