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.
He might have killed Willie for the reason Rivlin had suggested, because the baby had awoken and begun crying. But why would he disfigure their faces? Perhaps, again as Rivlin had said, it was simply an act of madness by a person who was clearly insane.
And afterward, with his clothes drenched in Esther's and Willie's blood, he could have crossed the street and entered his apartment without anyone seeing him. Easy.
But could this man, who had lunged at me so ineptly with a candlestick, break into an apartment and slash the throat of a woman before she could mount a struggle? And what of the fact that the killer had not struck before or since that night in August 1939—at least not in a sufficiently similar manner as to arouse Rivlin's suspicion? Manny Orrin, as his photo albums attested, had been obsessed with many women. If he had killed one, would he have been able to resist killing another for ten long years?
There was also the fact that I believed him. It was a belief not based on evidence but on instinct. Another investigator would have hauled him from his chair, slammed him against a wall, and third-degreed him for as long as it took to squeeze a confession out of him. It wouldn't have taken long. A little pressure would have broken him. That would have been enough for a police detective with few scruples. He would have downplayed or ignored the discrepancies between Orrin's confession and the crime scene. Just enough to get a conviction. Cops sometimes do that, especially when they're desperate or when their gut tells them they've got the right man, or when they find someone who deserves to be punished for something, even if he did not commit the specific crime they're investigating.
And Orrin did deserve to be punished for photographing women without their consent. But I did not think he had killed Esther and Willie. He was sick, but not that kind of sick.
Or was I reading him wrong? Was I being arrogant in believing my instincts would not mislead me? Was the killer sitting right here before me?
"I cried when I heard what happened," he said, sitting shrunken in his mother's chair. "I mourned."
