By the way his eyes dilated, I could tell I’d guessed right.
"Get up! On your feet!" I held out a hand to help him up. His palm was cold and clammy. I resisted the urge to rub my hand on my pants. "Where are the rest of the photos? Where do you keep them?" For there were more, of that I was sure.
"You have no right to touch my possessions." His whining tone grated on my ears.
"Where are they?" I growled. "Either show me, or I'll hit you again."
He didn't say anything, but his eyes roved past my shoulder toward a hall that led deeper into the apartment. I pushed him ahead of me past a bathroom and into a gloomy bedroom. Thick curtains were drawn across the windows. I flicked on the overhead triple-bulb light fixture and saw a room that contained a double bed with a headboard, a three-door closet, a wooden cabinet, and a dressing table with a large mirror. On the dressing table stood jars of cream and lotion, tubes of makeup, pins, and a hairbrush, all laid out in an orderly fashion. A woman's bedroom, which, judging by the heavy winter blanket on the bed and the general sense of disuse, had not been slept in for a long while. Pictures hung on the walls, these of a much-younger Manny Orrin, sometimes alone, sometimes at the side of an old severe-faced woman who I assumed was his mother. There were no recent pictures of them together, which led me to believe his mother was dead. When I flung open the closet doors, I saw old-fashioned dresses hanging neatly on hangers and more female clothing folded on shelves. The clothes smelled thickly of mothballs. It was clear that this had been the mother's room. Orrin had kept it as it had been when she died.
I tried the cabinet. It was locked. "Open it!" I said.
He shook his head.
"I'll tear this whole room apart if you don't. I won't leave one shred of clothing whole."
He gulped, his face tightening in suppressed anger, and I wondered what his anger was capable of driving him to do. But he didn't try anything, and his angry expression morphed into a resigned one. He produced a brass key from his pocket, inserted it in the lock, and pulled the cabinet door open.
Inside, arrayed on three shelves, were rows of photo albums. I grabbed Orrin's shoulder and pushed him toward the chair that stood before the dressing table. "Sit down and don't move."
He did as he was told, sitting with his hands between his knees, looking like a chastened child. I started leafing through the albums, beginning with those on the bottom shelf. The first few albums contained photos of the sort that hung in the living room—innocent pictures of buildings and streets, of Orrin and his mother, and of other people dressed in clothes long out of fashion—but as I got to the second row of albums, the nature of the pictures began to shift.
More and more of the photos were of women, all young and attractive. The early pictures were all snapped in public places. Gradually, the range of scenes expanded and there were photos of women inside apartments and houses, pictures taken through windows, some close-ups and some which had been shot from a distance. It was clear the women had no idea they were being photographed, but none were captured in intimate or sexually revealing circumstances.
Initially, the women seemed to have been chosen at random, none appearing in more than a handful of shots. Then there were whole album sections devoted to a single woman, as if Orrin's obsession had narrowed in focus, fixating on a single target for a time before shifting to another.
At the beginning of each section, over the first picture of the new object of Orrin's obsession, was a label with a woman's name written on it in blue or black ink. It was halfway through the second shelf of albums that I came upon the label marked with the name Esther Kantor and, two inches below that, the first photo of Esther. She was in the living room of her apartment, holding a mug to her lips, her right profile turned to the camera, her raven hair tucked behind her ear. More photos followed, more than had been taken of any other woman. Many of them long shots taken from Orrin's apartment, showing Esther in various clothes and in the midst of diverse activities—ironing, washing dishes, eating, brushing her hair. In one picture, she was holding her arms out sideways and appeared to be in the middle of a twirl.
"What's this?" I asked Orrin, showing him the picture.
"She's dancing. She liked to dance."
Other photos showed Esther with Willie in her arms, standing at the window or sitting on the sofa or feeding him. There were also photos of her outdoors—walking in the street, pushing a baby stroller, lugging grocery bags, drinking a beverage. None of the photos was indecent. Esther was always fully clothed. I stared hard at each photo as I removed it from its place in the album, searching for something, though I was not sure what it was, and failing to find it. With each photo that I laid aside on the bed I could feel my rage mounting, bubbling like lava inside me. Some of this rage was directed at Manny Orrin for stalking Esther and robbing her of her privacy. But most of my rage was for the unnamed killer. For these photos made Esther more real to me, painting a fuller picture of the life she'd had and lost.
On the back of each photo, Orrin had inscribed Esther's name and a date. Looking at the photos, I could follow Esther's life from the middle of May 1939, up to the 26th of August, hours before she was killed, which was when Orrin had taken his final photo of her. This one showed her walking down Rothschild Boulevard, wearing a light summer dress, clasping a bag in her left hand. There were people around her. My eyes went to each of their faces, and in my mind I could hear an irrational scream, "Couldn't one of you have saved her?"
"Why did you kill her?" I said when I finally lowered the picture.
"What?" Orrin looked shocked.
"And the baby? Why did you kill the baby?"
He began shaking his head furiously. "I didn't kill them."
"Were the pictures no longer enough? Did you need to up the thrill?"
"I'm telling you I didn't do it. I never even touched her or spoke to her. I…" He paused, reddening. "I never speak to any of them. I just take their pictures."
"Why?"
He gave a helpless, pathetic little jerk of the shoulders. "It…it's just something I do. I can't help it."
"Why did you choose Esther?"
"She was so beautiful," he said, and the adulation in his voice made my skin crawl. "So lively, so radiant. She was special, unlike any of the others. You can see it in the pictures."
I looked again and saw he was right. Esther was dazzlingly beautiful, even when she was dusting the furniture in her apartment or dragging a mop across the floor, but there was something about her beyond her beauty. Something intangible and undefinable, an aura or an energy that leaped from the picture to my searching eyes. Again I was filled with rage, but even more so with sadness and grief.
"I never would have hurt her," Orrin said in a low voice. "She was precious to me."
I gritted my teeth. "You stalked her. You took her pictures without her permission."
He didn't seem to have heard me. He spoke in a dreamy tone. "A few times I thought of going over and talking to her. She would not laugh at me, like other women did. She was kind and understanding. Maybe, just maybe, she would see something in me others never did. I never built up enough courage to do it."
"And you killed her because you knew she wouldn't want you." But even to my ears the accusation sounded hollow, lacking in conviction.
His voice was plaintive, almost childish. "I didn't do it."
I scrutinized him for a long moment. He was certainly a credible suspect. He was mentally unstable, and he'd had a bizarre fixation on Esther. He might have been driven to rage and murder over her rejection of him, real or anticipated. Moreover, from his living room window, he had a clear view of Esther's building. He could see when all the neighbors had turned off their lights, when the time was right for him to cross the street, climb the stairs, and enter apartment six, where Esther and Willie slept.