A Ticket to the Boneyard (11 page)

“No.”

“I could call,” he said, “but I don’t know how much good it would do. Those people generally cooperate, but it’s hard to light a fire under them. They tend to take their time. Of course you don’t need the photo until your friend in Ohio gets clearance to reopen the case, and that doesn’t happen until they get the new forensic report.”

“And maybe not then.”

“And maybe not then. But by that time you’ll probably have the photo from Dannemora. Unless, of course, they decide not to send it to you.”

“I don’t want to wait that long.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want to be able to go out and look for him.”

“So you want a photo to show.”

“Or a sketch,” I said.

He looked at me. “That’s a funny idea,” he said. “You mean one of our artists.”

“I figured you might know somebody who wouldn’t mind a little extra work.”

“Moonlighting, you mean. Draw a picture, pick up a couple of extra bucks.”

“Right.”

“I might at that. So you’ll sit down with him and get him to draw a picture of somebody you haven’t laid eyes on in a dozen years.”

“It’s a face you don’t forget.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And there was a picture that ran in the papers at the time of the arrest.”

“You didn’t keep a copy, did you?”

“No, but I could look at the microfilm over at the library. Refresh my memory.”

“And then sit down with the artist.”

“Right.”

“Of course you don’t know if the guy looks the same, all these years, but at least you’d have a picture of what he used to look like.”

“The artist could age him a little. They can do that.”

“Amazing what they can do. Maybe you’d all three get together, you and the artist and Whatsername.”

“Elaine.”

“Right, Elaine.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, “but it’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a bottomless well of good ideas. It’s my trademark. Offhand I can think of three guys who could do this for you, but there’s one I’ll call first, see if I can track him down. You wouldn’t get upset if this ran you a hundred bucks?”

“Not at all. More if necessary.”

“A hundred ought to be plenty.” He picked up the phone. “The guy I’m thinking of is pretty good,” he said. “More important, I think he might like the challenge.”

Ray Galindez looked more like a cop than an artist. He was medium height and stocky, with bushy eyebrows mounted over brown cocker spaniel eyes. At first I put him in his late thirties, but that was an effect of the weight he carried and a certain solemnity to his manner, and after a few minutes I lowered that estimate by ten or twelve years.

As arranged, he met us at Elaine’s that evening at seven-thirty. I’d arrived earlier, in time for her to make a pot of coffee and me to drink a cup of it. Galindez didn’t want any coffee. When Elaine offered him a beer he said, “Maybe later, ma’am. If I could just have a glass of water now that’d be great.”

He called us sir and ma’am, and doodled on a scratch pad while I explained the nature of the problem. Then he asked for a brief description of Motley and I gave him one.

“This ought to work,” he said. “What you’re describing is a very distinctive individual. That makes it much easier for me. What’s the worst thing is when you got an eyewitness and he says, ‘Oh, this was just an average person, real ordinary-looking, he just looked like everybody else.’ That means one of two things. Either your suspect had a face with nothing there to grab onto, or your witness wasn’t really seeing what he was looking at. That happens a lot when you’ve got different races. Your white witness looks at a black suspect and all he sees is a black person. You see the color and you don’t see the face.”

Before he did any drawing, Galindez led us in an eyes-closed visualization exercise. “The better you see him,” he said, “the more we get on the page.” Then he had me describe Motley in detail, and as I did so he worked up a sketch with a soft pencil and an Art-Gum eraser. I’d managed to get to the Forty-second Street library early that afternoon, and I’d located two newsphotos of Motley, one taken at the time of his arrest, the other during his trial. I don’t know that my memory needed refreshing, but I think they had helped clarify the visual image I’d had of him, the way you’d skim off the grime of the ages to restore an old painting.

It was remarkable, watching the face take shape on the sketch pad. He had both of us pointing out whatever looked off about the sketch, and he’d go to work with the eraser and make a slight change, and gradually the image came into focus with our memory. Then, when we couldn’t find anything else to object to, he brought the sketch up to date.

“What we’ve got here,” he said, “is already a man who looks older than twenty-eight years of age. Partly that’s because all three of us know for a fact that he’s forty or forty-one now, so our minds have been making little unconscious adjustments to our memory. Still, there’s more we can do. One thing that happens as you age, your features get more prominent. You take a young person and draw a caricature of him, ten or twenty years later it doesn’t look so exaggerated. I had an instructor once, she said we grow up to be caricatures of ourselves. What we’ll do here, we’ll make the nose a little bit larger, we’ll sink the eyes a little beneath the brow.” He did all this with a hint of shadow here, a change of line there. It was quite a demonstration.

“And gravity starts working on you,” he went on. “Pulls you down here and there.” A flick of the eraser, a stroke of the soft pencil. “And the hairline. Now here we’re in the dark on account of we lack information. Did he keep his hair? Is he bald as an egg? We just don’t know. But let’s say he did like most people do, most men, that is, and he’s got the beginnings of male-pattern baldness with the receding hairline. That doesn’t mean he’s going to look bald, or even well on his way. All it means is his hairline’s changed and he’s got himself a higher forehead, might look something like this.”

He added a suggestion of lines around the eyes, creases at the corners of the mouth. He increased the definition of the cheekbones, held the pad at arm’s length, made a minute adjustment with eraser and pencil.

“Well?” he said. “What do you think? Suitable for framing?”

His work done, Galindez accepted a Heineken. Elaine and I split a Perrier. He talked a little about himself, reluctantly at first, but Elaine was masterful at drawing him out. I suppose it was a professional talent of hers. He told us how drawing had always been something he could do, how he’d taken it so utterly for granted that it had never occurred to him to make a career of it. He’d always wanted to be a cop, had a favorite uncle in the department, and took the test for admission as soon as he finished up a two-year hitch at Kingsborough Community College.

He went on sketching for his own amusement, doing portraits and caricatures of his fellow officers; and one day in the absence of a regular police artist he was pressed into service to produce a sketch of a rapist. Now that was the bulk of what he did, and he loved it, but he felt himself being drawn away from police work. People had been suggesting that he might have the potential for an artistic career far greater than anything he could expect to realize in law enforcement, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

He said no to Elaine’s offer of a second beer, thanked me for the two fifties I handed him, and told us he hoped we’d let him know how things turned out. “When you take him down,” he said, “I hope I get a chance to see him, or at least a photo of him. Just to see how close I came. Sometimes you’ll see the actual guy and he’s nothing like what you drew, and other times anybody’d swear you must have been working from a model.”

When he left Elaine closed the door after him and engaged all the locks. “I feel silly doing this,” she said, “but I’ve been doing it anyway.”

“There are people all over town with half a dozen locks on every door, and alarm systems and everything else. And they don’t have somebody who’s threatened to kill them.”

“I suppose it’s comforting to know that,” she said. “He’s a nice kid, Ray. I wonder if he’ll stay a cop.”

“Hard to say.”

“Was there ever anything else you wanted to be? Besides a cop?”

“I never even wanted to be a cop. It was something I drifted into, and before I was out of the Academy I realized it was what I’d been born for. But I never knew that early on. When I was a kid I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio when I grew up, but that’s what every kid wanted, and I never had the moves to go with the desire.”

“You could have married Marilyn Monroe.”

“And sold coffee makers on television. There but for the grace of God.”

She carried our empty glasses into the kitchen and I trailed along behind her. She rinsed them under the tap, placed them in the strainer. “I think I’m getting stir-crazy,” she said. “What are you doing tonight? Do you have anyplace you have to be?”

I looked at my watch. I usually go to St. Paul’s on Fridays for the eight-thirty step meeting, but it was too late now, they’d already started. And I had caught a noon meeting downtown already that day. I told her I didn’t have anything planned.

“Well, how about a movie? How does that sound?”

It sounded fine. We walked over to Sixtieth and Third to a first-run house. It was the weekend so there was a line, but there was a pretty decent film at the end of it, a slick caper movie with Kevin Costner and Michelle Pfeiffer. “She’s not really pretty,” Elaine said afterward, “but there’s something about her, isn’t there? If I were a man, I’d want to fuck her.”

“Repeatedly,” I said.

“Oh, she does it for you, huh?”

“She’s all right.”

“ ‘Repeatedly,’ “ she said, and chuckled. Around us, Third Avenue was thronged with young people who looked as though the country were every bit as prosperous as the Republicans kept telling us it was. “I’m hungry,” Elaine announced. “You want to get a bite? My treat.”

“Sure, but why is it your treat?”

“You paid for the movie. Can you think of a place? Friday night in this neighborhood, wherever we go we’re going to be up to our tits in yuppies.”

“There’s a place in my neighborhood. Great hamburgers and cottage fries. Oh, wait a minute. You don’t eat hamburgers, do you? The fish is good there, but I forget if you said you eat fish.”

“Not anymore. How’s their salad?”

“They serve a good salad, but is that enough for you?”

She said it would be plenty, especially if she stole a few of my cottage fries. There were no empty cabs and the streets were full of people trying to hail one. We started to walk, then caught a bus on Fifty-seventh Street and got off at Ninth Avenue. The place I had in mind, Paris Green, was five blocks downtown. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a brown beard that hung down like an oriole’s nest, gave a wave as we cleared the threshold. His name was Gary, and he’d helped me out a few months ago when I’d been hired to find a girl who’d done some of her drinking there. The manager, whose name was Bryce, had been a little less helpful then, but he was helpful enough now, greeting us with a smile and showing us to a good table. A waitress with a short skirt and long legs came over to take our drink order, went away, and came back with Perrier for me and a Virgin Mary for Elaine. I must have been watching the girl’s departure, because Elaine tapped my glass with hers and advised me to stick to Michelle Pfeiffer.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“I’m sure you were.”

When the girl returned Elaine ordered the large garden salad. I had what I generally have there, a Jarlsberg cheeseburger and well-done fries. When the food came I had what felt like
déjà vu
until I realized I was getting echoes of Tuesday night, when I’d had a late bite at Armstrong’s with Toni. The two restaurants weren’t that much alike, and neither were the women. Maybe it was the cheeseburgers.

Halfway through mine I thought to ask her if it bothered her that I was eating a cheeseburger. She looked at me as though I were crazy and asked why it should bother her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You don’t eat meat, and I just wondered.”

“You must be kidding. Not eating meat is just a choice I make, that’s all. My doctor didn’t order me to quit, and it wasn’t an addiction I had to struggle with.”

“And you don’t have to go to the meetings?”

“What meetings?”

“Carnivores Anonymous.”

“What a thought,” she said, and laughed. Then her eyes narrowed and she looked appraisingly at me. “Is that what you did? AA?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought that was probably how you did it. Matt, would it have bothered you if I’d ordered a drink?”

“You did.”

“Right, a Virgin Mary. Would it have—”

“You know what the British call it? Instead of a Virgin Mary?”

“A Bloody Shame.”

“Right. No, it wouldn’t have bothered me if you’d ordered a real drink. You can order one now if you want.”

“I don’t.”

“Is that why you ordered a Virgin Mary? Because you thought it might bother me otherwise?”

“It didn’t even occur to me, as a matter of fact. I hardly ever drink alcohol these days. I hardly ever did. The only reason I asked was because
you
asked about the cheeseburger, and while we’ve been discussing meat and drink I’ve been sneaking your cottage fries.”

“While my attention was diverted elsewhere. We could probably arrange to get you some of your own.”

She shook her head. “Stolen sweets are best,” she said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?”

She wouldn’t let me take the check, and then rejected my suggestion that we split it. “I invited you,” she said. “Besides, I owe you money.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Ray Galindez. I owe you a hundred bucks.”

“The hell you do.”

“The hell I don’t. Some maniac’s trying to kill me and you’re protecting me. I ought to be paying your regular rate, you know that?”

“I don’t have a regular rate.”

“Well, I ought to be paying you what a client pays. I certainly ought to be covering the expenses. Speaking of which, you flew to Cleveland and back, you stayed over at a hotel—”