"Marc Laidlaw - The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laidlaw Marc)

The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio
by Marc Laidlaw
****
“You’ll like this,” said Schaeffer as he let Brovnik into the apartment. “She was a
photographer.”
Brovnik chuckled unhappily till the smell hit him; it fit right in with the buzzing
of flies. The other cops’ hard shoes clapped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall;
their voices echoed in the cluttered flat. Brovnik walked slowly, as if in a sweltering
museum. Dozens of unmounted photographs were thumbtacked to the walls, curled
by the July humidity. Schaeffer went into the bathroom with everyone else. Brovnik
wasn’t in any hurry to learn the cause of the splashing he heard. He bent close to a
picture of a white girl standing against a canvas tent, her head thrown back, arms
spread wide, the hilt of a sword and part of the blade poking out of her gullet. The
other pictures were just as freakish. He liked them.
“Come on, Bravo!”
He walked into the small tiled bathroom. Too many cops in it, and a humid
jungle reek, tainted with carrion. Water dripped from the mirror.
“Give him some room, guys.”
The body slumped in the tub, mostly submerged, short-cropped thick brown
hair matted on the surface like seagrass exposed at low tide. She was fully dressed.
One arm floated, propped on a knee, the hand looking swollen and peeled. The
water was murky pink. Streamers of red, like those little crepe-paper flowers you get
in Chinatown; drop a clamshell in water so it slowly opens and a tissue flower
unfurls. The room was too small and muggy. He clutched his camera gratefully to his
face, confining vision to one small window on a distorted tunnel with suicide at the
far end. Her other arm hung over one side of the tub, skin sucked in between the
tendons. He nearly stepped in blood as he walked around to get a better angle. It
was tacky, two days old, kept from hardening by humidity.
When he finished, the others came back in. He stood in the living room,
smoking, agitated. Why? Because she was a photographer? He looked over more of
the woman’s prints. Dwarfs, giants, freaks, a man covered with tattoos. Wonder
what kind of mind she’d had, to take pictures like this.
A few photos lay spread out on the couch, as if she’d been looking them over
while the water was running. He didn’t want to disturb them, but the one on top
disturbed him. The last thing she’d seen? A picture of Death standing in a freshly
mown field; Death as a woman in a Halloween skull, clutching a white sheet around
her. Hell, she’d gone rattling around with a head full of death, hunting it with her
camera. He couldn’t understand a mind like that. With his job, it was different. He
was a cop first, a photographer second, though these days he didn’t do much of
anything but photography and lab administration.
Schaeffer came up next to him, pointing at a picture of a shirtless Latin midget
in a hat sitting on a bed with a bottle on the nightstand next to him. Schaeffer nudged
him.
“What do you think, she slept with that dwarf to get his picture?”
“You’re sick,” Brovnik said.
“Me? She’s the one in the bath.”
“Bravo, hey,” came a call from the bathroom. “You drop something in here?”
He walked back toward the bathroom, trying to see no more of the interior
than he had to. Morrissey came out with a crumpled yellow foil film packet.
“|Messy, messy,” he said.