"Wouldn't it have to be a good one to sustain him this long?"
"No," I said. "All it had to do was get him started. Once he was in motion his own momentum would sustain him, no matter how frail the original impetus."
"Because he enjoys what he's doing."
"He loves it," I said, "but I have a feeling it's more than that. It's his whole life."
I had abbreviated versions of that conversation with as many of the other members as I could get hold of. I described Shorter and asked them if the description seemed to fit anybody who might have picked up a resentment against the group years ago. They all said essentially the same thing- the description fit too many people, and they couldn't think of anyone, of any description, who had any reason, sane or otherwise, to resent the group. Or even to know it existed.
"It's a shame there's no photograph," more than one of them said. And I explained how his employers in Corona had taken a pair of Polaroids, but nobody could furnish a copy. One was on his ID, which he'd very likely retained; the other had conveniently disappeared from his file.
And when, I wondered, had that happened? Had he been resourceful enough to slip off with the photo before they let him go? Or had he paid an unauthorized visit sometime over the weekend to tidy up after himself? He could have combined it with the trip to Forest Hills to drown Helen Watson in her tub.
"Wouldn't he have had other pictures taken?" Elaine wondered. "How did he cash his paychecks? I can't believe he had a bank account."
"He used a check-cashing service. But he had his Queensboro-Corona ID and his driver's license. He wouldn't need anything else."
"And you sat across a table from him."
"And took him to a meeting."
"And you don't get mugged and printed at AA meetings, do you? I guess it would be a violation of the tradition of anonymity, wouldn't it?"
"I'm afraid so."
"If I'd been along," she said, "I could have taken a sneak photo of him, the way we did at Wallbanger's. Remember?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said.
"What's the matter? Did I say something wrong?"
"No," I said. "You said something right. I don't know what the hell's the matter with me, I really don't. Why can't I think straight?"
"What do you mean?"
For answer I pointed to a framed drawing on the wall.
26
"I'll tell you something," Ray Galindez said. "This is a piece of cake. You got a nice clear picture of the guy in your mind and how long did it take to get it out of your head and onto a piece of paper? Fifteen, twenty minutes?"
"Something like that."
"Compared to witnesses who don't know how to use their eyes and can't remember what they saw with them, this is a cinch. I had one a week ago, over and over she's telling me I got the eyes wrong. How are they wrong? Too big, too small, too far apart, too close together, what? Are they slanted? Are they almond-shaped? Droopy eyelids? Tell me something, because just saying they're wrong don't cut it. I try this, I try that, I change this, I fix that, all I get is the eyes are wrong. You know what it turns out?"
"What?"
"She never saw his fuckin' eyes. The guy was wearing mirrored sunglasses. It takes her the better part of an hour to remember this, and this is a guy who stood right smack in fucking front of her and held her up at gunpoint. 'The eyes are wrong,' she said. 'I'll never forget those eyes.' Except she never saw 'em, so what's she gonna forget?"
"At least she had the sense to sit down with you," I said. "I couldn't get past the fact that I didn't have a photograph of him. I was sitting in the same room with one of your sketches and I still didn't get the message."
"Sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of you."
"I guess."
When I went to pay him he didn't want to take the money. "I figure I owe you," he said, "everything Elaine's done for me. I took my mother to see the gallery and now every word out of her mouth is mi hijo el artista. She wasn't this impressed when I got on the job. Speaking of which, it's not the same."
"The Department?"
"Oh, who's to say, but I'm just talking about my own detail. They want me to use a computer to do what I do."
"You mean like an Identi-Kit?"
"No, this is different," he said. "Much more flexible than the Identi-Kit. You can make minute adjustments to the shape of the mouth, elongate the head, set the eyes deeper, anything you could do with pencil and paper." He explained how the software worked and what it would do. "But it's not drawing," he said. "It's not art."
He laughed, and I asked him what was funny.
"Just hearing myself use the word," he said. "I would always correct Elaine when she called it art, what I do. I'm beginning to think she's right. I'll tell you one thing, what I been doing with that European woman is different from anything I ever done before. You know about her? Customer of Elaine's, she lost all her family in the Holocaust?"
"Elaine told me. I didn't know you'd started working with her."
"Two sessions so far, and it's the most exhausting thing I ever did in my life. She doesn't remember what any of the people look like."
"Then how can you possibly draw them?"
"Oh, the memory's in there. It's a question of reaching in and dragging it out. We started with her father. What did he look like? Well, that doesn't get us anywhere, because she hasn't got an answer. The best she can do is he's tall. Okay, what kind of man is he? He's very gentle, she says. Okay, so I start drawing. He's got a deep voice, she remembers. I draw some more. Sometimes he would lose his temper. Okay, now I'm drawing a tall gentle man with a deep voice who gets angry. Late at night he would sit at the kitchen table adding columns of numbers. Okay, great, let's draw that. And we keep on, and now and then we have to stop because she's crying, or she can't look at the paper anymore, or she's just wiped out. Believe me, time we're done, we're both wiped out."
"And you wound up with a human face?"
"I wound up with a human face," he said, "but whose face? Does it look like the man who went to the gas chamber? No way to know. It brought back memories, I know that much, and she's got a picture that means something to her, so what's the difference? Is it as good as a photograph? Well, maybe it's better. Is it art?" He shrugged. "I have to say I think so."
"And this?"
"This prick?" He leaned forward, blew some eraser dust from the surface of the sketch. "This doesn't have to be art. Just so it looks like him."
I went to a copy shop, ran two dozen copies of the sketch. It seemed to me it was a good likeness. I gave the original to Elaine but told her not to hang it anywhere for the time being. I left a copy with TJ, who raised an eyebrow and announced that Shorter was an ugly-looking dude.
Over the next few days, I got around to most of the men who'd been at the meeting at Gruliow's house, as well as a few who hadn't been able to make it. No one echoed TJ's sentiment, but neither did anyone recognize Shorter as a long-lost cousin.
"He's a pretty ordinary-looking guy," Bob Berk told me. "Not a face that would jump out at you in a crowd."
Several of them said he looked vaguely familiar. Lewis Hildebrand told me he might have seen Shorter before, that it was impossible to say. "The visual onslaught in this city is overpowering," he said. "Walk a few blocks through midtown Manhattan and more people will pass through your field of vision than the average small-town resident will see all year. Walk through Grand Central Station at rush hour and you'll see thousands of people without really seeing any of them. How much of it do we screen out? How much registers, consciously or otherwise?"
In his living room on Commerce Street, Hard-Way Ray Gruliow squinted at the sketch and shook his head. "He looks familiar," he said. "But in a very vague way."
"That's what I keep hearing."
"What a crazy thing, huh? Here's somebody who hates us all enough to devote his entire life to killing us. Because he's not a guy who got pissed off one morning and took a gun to the Post Office. This is his life's work."