It was almost an hour before he saw someone go up the stairs of 89 Grove Street. She was a tall, slender woman with close-cropped blond hair, and she moved very quickly through the rain.
Corman headed toward her quickly, making it to the bottom of the landing just as the woman got to the top.
“Excuse me,” he said, then offered a quick, uneasy smile the woman did not return. “I was wondering if you were Bernice Taylor, by any chance.”
The woman eyed him silently, with a certain icy wariness, as if already calculating her moves if he should suddenly lunge toward her. “I’m Bernice Taylor,” she said in a voice that sounded as if it had slid off the blade of a knife.
“My name’s David Corman. I’ve been looking into someone’s life, and your name’s come up.”
She seemed to guess his business. “Candy’s not here,” she said. “She moved out a month ago.”
“I’m not looking for Candy,” Corman said. “Somebody else. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Sarah Rosen.”
Her small eyes squeezed together. “Sarah Rosen? You mean Dr. Rosen’s little girl?”
“Her father’s a doctor? Do you know his full name?”
Bernice shrugged. “I always just called him Dr. Rosen. Maybe I knew his name one time, but I can’t recall it now.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, he wasn’t a real doctor,” she added. “Just one of those teacher-type doctors.”
“A professor?”
“Yeah. College professor. Columbia,” Bernice said. “Why are you asking about Sarah?”
Corman saw no reason to blur the issue. “She’s dead,” he told her. “I was hoping I could talk to you about her.”
“When’d she die?” the woman asked.
“Last Thursday.”
Bernice’s face remained passive. “You a friend of hers?”
“I never knew her,” Corman said. “But I’m trying to find out what she was like.” He anticipated her next question. “She was selling blood at this place on the Bowery. She listed you as her next of kin.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Me? Next of kin?” She shook her head. “I haven’t even seen Sarah since she was five years old.”
“Would you mind talking to me, Mrs. Taylor, or is it Miss or …”
“Just Bernice,” she answered dryly. “Yeah, okay. I’ll tell you what I know.” She turned, opened the door and headed up the stairs. Corman followed behind her until they reached the third-floor landing.
“I was living in this same place back then,” she said as she fumbled for her keys. “I guess that’s how Sarah had the address.” She swung the door open and walked inside.
It was a tiny studio, but everything had been arranged in a neat, orderly fashion that made it look larger than it was. Two orange overstuffed chairs rested by the front window, ashtrays balanced on the right arms. A large hoop rug stretched between them, sending out swirls of steadily lightening yellows from its dark brown center, so that from where Corman stood it looked like a huge yellow eye, its dark pupil staring sightlessly toward the faded ceiling.
She moved directly to one of the orange chairs and motioned for Corman to take the other.
“So, you knew Sarah when she was a child,” Corman began, as he leaned back into it.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“When her mother got killed, her father needed somebody,” Bernice said. “That’s when I come by.”
“Her mother was killed?”
“That’s what Dr. Rosen said. Hit by a car. Right on the street.” She reached under her chair, drew out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.
“What year was that?” Corman asked.
“That must have been in 1973, something like that.”
“And you worked for Dr. Rosen after that?”
“That’s right.”
“For how long?”
“Couple of months,” Bernice said. “Up until November.” She inhaled deeply, then let it out in a quick angry burst. “Then he let me go.”
Corman looked up from his notebook. “Why?”
Bernice smiled bitterly. “Guess I wasn’t good enough to watch over his precious little daughter.”
“In what way not good enough?”
Bernice shifted slightly in her seat, threw one long bony leg over the other and rocked it edgily. “He had a check done on me. That’s when he found out I had a record. If he’d asked me, I’d of told him about it. I’m not ashamed of what I did. But Rosen had his own way of doing things.”
“What way was that?”
“On the sly, you might say,” Bernice said. “He never came clean on anything. You always felt like you were talking to somebody he’d sort of made up, not the man himself.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he had a check done, and I came up with a record, so that was the end of that.”
“And this was only about two months after he hired you?” Corman asked.
“Yeah, about that. Two months, I’d say. Not much longer. She was five years old, I think. Went to this private school over on the East Side. Every morning the car came for her. The car was always coming for her. Dr. Rosen wouldn’t let her out on the street. Not even for a little walk. Wherever she went, the car took her.”
“Did you talk with her very often?”
“I would have talked to her,” Bernice said. “I didn’t have nothing against her. But she never seemed that interested. One time—this was just before I was let go—Candy, that’s my little girl, she got sent home from school, so they called me to come get her, and I had to leave, so I took Sarah with me, because I knew Rosen wouldn’t want her left alone in the house. So, anyway, I took her home with me, and when I picked Candy up, we all went to the park near the school, and they played together for a while.” Her face grew more concentrated as the memory returned to her. “Sarah was real quiet. She sat real close to me. She wouldn’t do much. Candy was about her age, but tougher, the way she’s always been, and Sarah didn’t want to play with her. I guess she was afraid. Anyway, it took forever for Candy to get her in the swings. But after she got in it, she swung a little. Not too high, sort of dragging her foot.” She dropped the cigarette into the ashtray, lit another. “That’s about the only time we really had together. The very next day, that’s when Rosen found out about me, and that’s when he let me go.”
“What did he find out exactly?” Corman asked.
“What I did to Harold.”
“Harold?”
“Candy’s daddy,” Bernice said. “I shot him one night. Everything was setting him off, and I got tired of it, so when he started in on me, I shot him. The bullet went right through his arm. Didn’t even touch a bone.” She shrugged. “I just got three years, and even that was a suspended sentence, but that didn’t matter to Rosen. With him, a record was a record.”
“And that’s why he fired you?”
“That’s what he told me,” Bernice said. “He said he’d hired this guy. Told me his name. Walter Maddox. He said this Maddox guy had checked up on me, and it came out I had a record, and he didn’t want anybody like that around.” She shrugged. “He was nice about it, I guess, gave me a whole month’s pay.”
Corman nodded and wrote Maddox’s name in his notebook.
“So really, as far as Sarah was concerned, I didn’t know much about her,” Bernice added. “Didn’t have time to learn much.”
“Did you get some sense of her?”
Bernice thought a moment. “Well, there was this one thing she did that made me wonder.”
“What?”
“She bit through her lip one night,” Bernice said. “Almost all the way through it. Her bottom lip.”
“Why?”