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.
