"Me llamo Matteo," I said.
We sat in the kitchen. They'd bought a narrow two-story row house on Bedford Avenue, midway between the subway stop and McCarren Park. The neighborhood, Northside, was turning increasingly artsy, as were nearby Greenpoint and much of the rest of Williamsburg. Industrial buildings were being converted to artists' lofts, far more affordable than those across the river in SoHo and TriBeCa, and little houses like Ray and Bitsy's were shedding their siding like butterflies emerging from cocoons.
It was an unusual neighborhood for a cop to choose but a natural one for an artist, and Ray was both. A police sketch artist, he had an uncanny ability to render in black and white the images summoned up from a witness's memory. And there was a further dimension, a genuine artistry that had led Elaine to request a drawing he'd done of a chilling sociopath as my Christmas gift to her. Then she'd engaged him to draw her long-dead father, working not from photos but extracting the man's features from her memory. She'd since given Ray a show in her shop, and steered some commissions his way. Someday I wanted him to do a real portrait of her, but right now I needed him to do that same thing the city paid him to do.
"Two goons jumped me a few nights ago," I told him, "and I got a good look at one of them. But I didn't report it, and it's almost certainly connected to some other matters where I'm playing a lone hand."
"So the department's not supposed to know about this. I've got no problem with that, Matt."
"You're sure?"
"No problem at all. I'll tell you something, I'm sitting on the fence. I'd put in my papers tomorrow if money wasn't an issue." He waved a hand, brushing the whole subject aside. "Tell me about this mutt that wanted a piece of you," he said, pencil in hand. "What did you happen to notice about him?"
We had done this before, though not recently, and we worked well together. In this instance our task was an easy one, because I could close my eyes and bring the image into sharp focus. I could picture the face of the man who'd held a gun on me, could see the expression he'd shown when he set himself to take a swing at my middle.
"That's it," I said, when the pencil lines on the pad matched the face I remembered. "You know, no matter how many times we do this it never ceases to amaze me. It's like a Polaroid camera, the film pops out and turns into a picture before your eyes."
"Sometimes they'll catch the guy and you'd swear I drew him from life, it's that close. And I have to tell you that feels good."
"I can imagine."
"And other times they get the guy, and I see his photo, and I look back and forth between the photo and my drawing, and I swear there's no resemblance whatsoever. Like they could be members of different species."
"Well, that's the witness's fault, Ray."
"It's both our fault."
"He's the one who remembered the guy wrong."
"And I'm the one didn't dig out the right memory, which is part of what I do."
"Well, yeah, I see what you mean. But you can never expect to be a hundred percent."
"Oh, I know that. It's frustrating, that's all."
"And you're not crazy about the job these days."
"I'm marking time, Matt."
"How old are you and how close are you to your twenty?"
"I'm thirty-three and I've got eleven years in."
"So you're more than halfway there."
"I know, and I hate to give it up. And it's not just the pension, it's the benefits. I could quit now and cover the basics, paying the mortgage and putting food on the table, but what about medical insurance?"
I asked why the job was getting to him.
"I'm obsolete," he said. "When they had the Identi-Kits I thought, well, hell, it's Mr. Potato Head for cops. Paste on a mustache, paste on a different hairline, you know how it goes."
"Sure."
"I could run rings around that thing, and I knew it. Then they developed a computer program that did the same thing but was a lot more sophisticated about it, and now they got it so you can take an image and morph it. You know, stretching a feature, shrinking it, whatever."
"I can't believe it's better than you at getting a likeness."
"I have to say I agree with you. But the thing is anybody can do it. All they do is train you and you can do it. Maybe you can't draw a straight line with a ruler, but you can be a police artist all the same. And there's more. See, they like the way the computer likenesses present."
"How do you mean, present?"
"To the public. I do a drawing, people look at it, they say to themselves, oh, an artist did this, so it's just an approximation. But they can make that computer likeness come out looking like a photograph, and you see it and it seems authentic. It's got credibility. It may not look like the perpetrator, but it sure shows up nice on TV."
I tapped the sketch he'd done. "This one's never going to be seen on TV," I said, "and it looks just like the son of a bitch."
"Well, thanks, Matt. Now how about the other one?"
"The other goon? I told you, I didn't get a good enough look at him."
"Maybe you saw more than you think you did."
"The light was bad," I said. "The streetlamp was shining in my eyes and his face was in shadow. And he was only in front of me for a second or two anyway. It's not a question of memory."
"I understand," he said. "All the same, I've had some luck in similar situations."
"Oh?"
"What I think happens," he said, "is that the memory doesn't get suppressed, but it barely registers in the first place. You see something, and the image hits the retina, but your mind's on something else and you never know you see it. But it's there all the same." He spread his hands. "I don't know, but if you're not in a hurry…"
"I'm certainly willing to try."
"Okay, so just get comfortable and let yourself relax. Start with your feet and just let them go completely limp. This isn't hypnosis, by the way, which is to my mind a great way to get people to remember things they never saw in the first place. This is just to relax you. Now your lower legs, letting them relax completely…"
I didn't have a problem with the relaxation technique, having gone through something similar at a workshop Elaine dragged me to once. He led me through it, and he had me envision a canvas hanging on a wall, all in a gilded frame. Then he instructed me to see the face painted on the canvas.
I was all set to tell him it wasn't working, and then damned if there wasn't a face looking back at me on the framed canvas I'd constructed in my mind's eye. It didn't look as if it had been pieced together with an Identi-Kit, either, or morphed on a computer. It was a real human face with a real expression on it. And I knew it, by God. I'd seen it before.
"Shit," I said.
"You're not getting anything? Give it time."
I sat up, opened my eyes. "I got a face," I said, "and I was all excited, because it was like magic the way it appeared."
"I know, that's what it's like. Like magic."
"But it was the wrong face."
"How do you know?"
"Because the face I just saw belongs to somebody else. A few days prior to the incident I was in a bar, and I caught a glimpse of a guy. You know how you'll see a person and you know him but you don't know how you know him?"
"Sure."
"That's what happened. Our eyes met, and I knew him and he knew me, or seemed to. But I can't think how, and the fact of the matter is I probably saw him once on the subway and his face imprinted itself in my memory. New York's like that. You'll see more people in a day than the entire population of a small town. Except it's in passing. You don't really see them."
"But you saw this face."
"Yes, and now I can't get it out of my mind."
"What's it look like?"
"What's the difference, Ray? It's just a face."