Time Exposures

by Wilson Tucker

  He changed magazines to prepare for the kitchen.

  A wild notion stopped his hand, stopped him in the act of swiveling the camera. He walked over to the heavy chair, walked around behind it, sidestepped the spilled blood, and found himself in direct line between door and window. Tabbot looked out of the window—imagining a gun at his back—and pivoted slowly to stare at the door: early sunlight coming in the window should have limned the man’s face. The camera placed here should photograph the assailant’s face and record the gun blast as well.

  Tabbot hauled tripod and camera across the room and set up in position behind the chair, aiming at the door. The lens was changed again. Another calculation was made. If he was really lucky on this series the murderer would fire at the camera.

  Kitchen coverage was a near repetition of the first room. It required a little less time.

  Tabbot photographed the table and two chairs, the dirty dishes, the toast crumbs, the tiny stove, the aged refrigerator, the tacked-on dish cupboards above the sink and drain board, the sink itself, a cramped water closet masquerading as a broom closet behind a narrow door, and the stained folding door of the shower stall. The stall had leaked.

  He opened the refrigerator door and found a half bottle of red wine alongside the foodstuffs: two takes an hour apart. He peered into the cramped confines of the water closet: a few desultory exposures, and a hope that the blonde wasn’t sitting in there. The shower stall was lined with an artificial white tile now marred by rust stains below a leaky showerhead: two exposures by way of an experiment, because the stall also contained a miniature wash basin, a mirror, and a moisture-proof light fixture. He noted with an absent approval that the fixture lacked a receptacle for plugging in razors.

  Tabbot changed to the wide-angle lens for the wrap-up. There was no window in the kitchen, and he made a mental note of the absence of an escape door—a sad violation of the fire laws.

  That exhausted the preliminary takes.

  Tabbot fished his I.D. card out of his pocket, gathered up the exposed film magazines and walked out of the apartment. There was no keeper blocking passage through the doorway, and he stared with surprise at the patrolman still lounging in the corridor.

  The patrolman read his expression.

  “It’s coming, Sergeant, it’s coming. By this time I guess that Lieutenant has chewed somebody out good, so you can bet it’s coming in a hurry.”

  Tabbot put the I.D. card in his pocket.

  The patrolman asked: “Was she shot up, like they said? Back to front, right out the belly?”

  Tabbot nodded uneasily. “Back to front, but out through the rib cage—not the belly. Somebody used a very heavy gun on her. Do you want a print? You could paste it up in your locker.”

  “Oh, hell no!” The man glanced down the corridor and came back to the sergeant. “I heard the coroner say it was a professional job; only the pro’s are crazy enough to tote guns anymore. The risk and everything.”

  “I suppose so; I haven’t heard of an amateur carrying one for years. That mandatory jail sentence for possession scares the hell out of them.” Tabbot shifted the magazines to his other hand to keep them away from his bad knee going down the stairs.

  The street was bright with sunlight—the kind of brilliant scene which Sergeant Tabbot wanted everything to happen in for better results. Given a bright sun he could reproduce images a little better than grainy shadows, right up to that fourteen-hour stopping point.

  His truck was the only police vehicle parked at the curb.

  Tabbot climbed into the back and closed the door behind him. He switched on the developing and drying machine in total darkness, and began feeding the film from the first magazine down into the tanks. When the tail of that film slipped out of the magazine and vanished, the leader of the second film was fed into the slot. The third followed when its time came. The sergeant sat down on a stool, waiting in the darkness until the developer and dryer had completed their cycles and delivered the nylon negatives into his hands. After a while he reached out to switch on the printer, and then did nothing more than sit and wait.

  The woman’s exploded breast hung before his eyes; it was more vivid in the darkness of the truck than in bright daylight. This time his stomach failed to churn, and he supposed he was getting used to the memory. Or the sight-memory was safely in his past. A few of the coming prints could resurrect that nightmare image.

  The coroner believed some hood had murdered the woman who made Christmas dolls—some professional thug who paid as little heed to the gun law as he did to a hundred and one other laws. Perhaps—and perhaps not. Discharged servicemen were still smuggling weapons into the country, when coming in from overseas posts; he’d heard of that happening often enough, and he’d seen a few of the foolhardy characters in jails. For some reason he didn’t understand, ex-Marines who’d served in China were the most flagrant offenders: they outnumbered smugglers from the other services three or four to one and the harsh penalties spelled out in the Dean Act didn’t deter them worth a damn. Congress in its wisdom had proclaimed that only peace officers, and military personnel on active duty, had the privilege of carrying firearms; all other weapons must under the law be surrendered and destroyed.

  Tabbot didn’t own a gun; he had no use for one. That patrolman on the third floor carried a weapon, and the Lieutenant, and the plainclothesman—but he didn’t think the coroner would have one. Nor the basket men. The Dean Act made stiff prison sentences mandatory for possession among the citizenry, but the Marines kept on carrying them and now and then some civilian died under gunfire. Like the woman who made Christmas dolls.

  A soft buzzer signaled the end of the developer’s job. Tabbot removed the three reels of nylon negative from the drying rack and fed them through the printer. The waiting time was appreciably shorter. Three long strips of printed pictures rolled out of the printer into his hands. Tabbot didn’t waste time cutting the prints into individual frames. Draping two of the strips over a shoulder, he carried the third to the door of the truck and flung it open. Bright sunlight made him squint, causing his eyes to water.

  Aloud: “Oh, what the hell! What went wrong?”

  The prints were dark, much darker than they had any right to be. He knew without rechecking the figures in his notebook that the exposures had been made after sunrise, but still the prints were dark. Tabbot stared up the front of the building, trying to pick out the proper window, then brought his puzzled gaze back to the strip prints. The bedroom-living room was dark.

  Peering closer, squinting against the bright light of the sun: four timed exposures of the front door, with the dim figures of the janitor and another man standing open-mouth on the third exposure. Ten minutes after nine. The fifth frame: a bright clear picture of the plain-clothesman sitting on the sofa, talking up to Tabbot. The sixth frame and onward: dark images of the sofa opened out into a bed—coffee table missing—the kitchen doorway barely discernible, the overstuffed chair (and there was the coffee table beside it), the window— He stared with dismay at the window. The goddam drapes were drawn, shutting out the early light!

  Tabbot hurriedly checked the second strip hanging on his shoulder: equally dark. The floor lamp and the ceiling light were both unlit. The drapes had been closed all night and the room was in cloudy darkness. He could just identify the radiator, the vase of flowers, the bookcase, the smaller chair, and numerous exposures of the closed door. The floor frames were nearly black. Now the camera changed position, moving to the kitchen doorway and shooting back into the bedroom with a wide-angle lens. Dark frustration.

  The bed was folded away into an ordinary sofa, the coffee table had moved back to its rightful position, the remaining pieces of furniture were undisturbed, the drapes covered the only window, the lights were not lit. He squinted at the final frames and caught his breath. A figure—a dim and indistinct somebody of a figure—stood at the far corner of the coffee table looking at the closed door.

  Tabbot grabbed up the thi
rd strip of prints.

  Four frames gave him nothing but a closed door. The fifth frame exploded in a bright halo of flash: the gun was fired into the waiting lens.

  Sergeant Tabbot jumped out of the truck, slammed shut the door behind him and climbed the stairs to the third floor. His bad knee begged for an easier pace. The young patrolman was gone from his post upstairs.

  A keeper blocked the door to the apartment.

  Tabbot approached it cautiously while he fished in his pockets for the I.D. card. At a distance of only two feet he detected the uneasy squirmings of pain in his groin; if he attempted to squeeze past the machine into the apartment the damned thing would do its utmost to tear his guts apart. The testicles were most vulnerable. A keeper always reminded him of a second generation fire hydrant—but if he was grilled at one of the precinct houses he would never be able to describe a second generation fire hydrant to anyone’s satisfaction. His interrogator would insist it was only a phallic symbol.

  The keeper was fashioned of stainless steel and colorless plastic: it stood waist high with a slot and a glowing bullseye in its pointed head, and it generated a controlled fulguration emission—a high-frequency radiation capable of destroying animal tissue. The machines were remarkably useful for keeping prisoners in and inquisitive citizenry out.

  Tabbot inserted his I.D. into the slot and waited for the glow to fade out of the bullseye.

  A telephone rested on the floor at the far end of the sofa, half hidden behind a stack of dusty books: the woman had read Western novels. He dialed the precinct house and waited while an operator located the officer.

  Impatiently: “Tabbot here. Who opened the drapes?”

  “What the hell are you— What drapes?”

  “The drapes covering the window, the only window in the room. Who opened them this morning? When?”

  There was a speculative silence. “Sergeant, are those prints worthless?”

  “Yes, sir—nearly so. I’ve got one beautiful shot of that detective sitting on the sofa after the drapes were opened.” He hesitated for a moment while he consulted the notebook. “The shot was fired at six forty-five this morning; the janitor opened the door at ten minutes after nine. And I really have a nice print of the plain-clothesman.”

  “Is that all?’

  “All that will help you. I have one dim and dirty print of a somebody looking at the door, but I can’t tell you if that somebody is man or woman, red or green.”

  The Lieutenant said: “Oh, shit!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The coroner opened those drapes—he wanted more light to look at his corpse.”

  Wistfully: “I wish he’d opened them last night before she was a corpse.”

  “Are you sure they’re worthless?”

  “Well, sir, if you took them into court and drew that same judge, he’d throw you out.”

  “Damn it! What are you going to do now?”

  “I’ll go back to six forty-five and work around that gunshot. I should be able to follow the somebody to the door at the same time—I suppose it was the woman going over to let the murderer in. But don’t get your hopes up, Lieutenant. This is a lost cause.”

  Another silence, and then: “All right, do what you can. A hell of a note, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.” He rang off.

  Tabbot hauled the bulky camera into position at one end of the coffee table and angled at the door; he thought the set-up would encompass the woman walking to the door, opening it, turning to walk away, and the assailant coming in. All in murky darkness. He fitted a fresh magazine to the camera, inspected the lens for non-existent dirt, and began the timing calculations. The camera began ticking off the exposures bracketing the point of gunfire.

  Tabbot went over to the window to finish his inspection of the third strip of prints: the kitchen. The greater bulk of them were as dark as the bedroom.

  The strip of prints suddenly brightened just after that point at which he’d changed to a wide-angle lens, just after he’d begun the final wrap-up. A ceiling light had been turned on in the kitchen.

  Tabbot stared at a naked woman seated at the table.

  She held both hands folded over her stomach, as though pressing in a role of flesh. Behind her the narrow door of the water closet stood ajar. The table was bare. Tabbot frowned at the woman, at the pose, and then rummaged through his notes for the retroactive exposure time: five minutes past six. The woman who made Christmas dolls was sitting at a bare table at five minutes past six in the morning, looking off to her left, and holding her hands over her stomach. Tabbot wondered if she were hungry—wondered if she waited on some imaginary maid to prepare and serve breakfast. Eggs, coffee, dry toast.

  He searched for a frame of the stove: There was a low gas flame beneath the coffee pot. No eggs frying. Well... they were probably three-minute eggs, and these frames had been exposed five or ten minutes apart.

  He looked again at the woman and apologized for the poor joke: she would be dead in forty minutes.

  The only other item of interest on the third strip was a thin ribbon of light under the shower curtain. Tabbot skipped backward along the strip seeking the two exposures angled into the shower stall, but found them dark and the stall empty. The wrong hour.

  Behind him the camera shut itself off and called for attention.

  Tabbot carried the instrument across the room to an advantageous position beside an arm of the chair and again angled toward the door. The timer was reset for a duplicate coverage of the scenes just completed, but he expected no more than a shadowy figure entering, firing, leaving—a murky figure in a darkened room. A new series was started with that one flash frame as the centerpiece.

  His attention went back to the woman at the table. She sat with her hands clasped over her stomach, looking off to her left. Looking at what?

  On impulse, Tabbot walked into the kitchen and sat down in her chair. Same position, same angle. Tabbot pressed his hands to his stomach and looked off to his left. Identical line of sight. He was looking at the shower stall.

  One print had given him a ribbon of light under the stained curtain—no, stained folding door. The barrier had leaked water.

  He said aloud: “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  The printed strips were stretched across the table to free his hands and then he examined his notebook item by item. Each of the prints had peered into the past at five minutes after six in the morning. Someone took a shower while the woman sat by the table.

  Back to the last few frames of the second strip taken from the second magazine: a figure—a dim and indistinct somebody of a figure—stood at the far corner of the coffee table looking at the closed door. Time: six-forty. Five minutes before the shot was fired.

  Did the woman simply stand there and wait a full five minutes for a knock on the door? Or did she open it only a moment after the exposure was made, let the man in, argue with him, and die five minutes later behind the chair? Five minutes was time enough for an argument, a heated exchange, a threat, a shot.

  Tabbot braced his hands on the table edge.

  What happened to the man in the shower? Was he still there—soaking himself for forty minutes—while the woman was gunned down? Or had he come out, dried himself, gulped down breakfast and quit the apartment minutes before the assailant arrived?

  Tabbot supplied answers: no, no, no, and maybe.

  He jumped up from the chair so quickly it fell over. The telephone was behind the stack of Western novels.

  The man answering his call may have been one of the wicker basket men.

  “County morgue.”

  “Sergeant Tabbot here, Photo Section. I’ve got preliminary prints on that woman in the apartment. She was seated at the breakfast table between six o’clock and six-fifteen. How does that square with the autopsy?”

  The voice said cheerfully: “Right on the button, Sergeant. The toast was still there, know what I mean?”

  Weakly: “I know what you mean. I’ll send ove
r the prints.”

  “Hey, wait—wait, there’s more. She was just a little bit pregnant. Two months, maybe.”

  Tabbot swallowed. An unwanted image tried to form in his imagination: the autopsy table, a stroke or two of the blade, an inventory of the contents of the stomach— He thrust the image away and set down the telephone.

  Aloud, in dismay: “I thought the man in the shower ate breakfast! But he didn’t—he didn’t.” The inoperative phone gave him no answer.

  The camera stopped peering into the past.

  Tabbot hauled the instrument into the kitchen and set up a new position behind the woman’s chair to take the table, stove, and shower stall. The angle would be right over her head. A series of exposures two minutes apart was programmed into the timer with the first frame calculated at six o’clock. The probe began. Tabbot reached around the camera and gathered up the printed strips from the table. The light was better at the window and he quit the kitchen for yet another inspection of the dismal preliminaries.

  The front door, the janitor and a second man in the doorway, the bright beauty of a frame with the detective sitting on the sofa, the darkened frames of the sofa pulled out to make a bed— Tabbot paused and peered. Were there one or two figures sprawled in the bed? Next: the kitchen doorway, the overstuffed chair, the misplaced coffee table, the window with the closed drapes— All of that. On and on. Dark. But were there one or two people in the bed?

  And now consider this frame: a dim and indistinct somebody looking at the closed door. Was that somebody actually walking to the door, caught in mid-stride? Was that somebody the man from the shower?

  Tabbot dropped the strips and sprinted for the kitchen.

  The camera hadn’t finished its programmed series but Tabbot yanked it from position and dragged it over the kitchen floor. The tripod left marks. The table was pushed aside. He stopped the timer and jerked aside the folding door to thrust the lens into the shower stall. Angle at the tiny wash basin and the mirror hanging above it; hope for sufficient reflected light from the white tiles. Strap on a fresh magazine. Work feverishly with the side rule. Check and check again the notes to be certain of times. Set the timer and start the camera. Stand back and wait.