They went out and down the stairs to a room like a classroom. They sat in the front row.
Vanesco said, “We’re going to show you four men. I won’t tell you how many are suspects. I want you to look and if you recognize anyone, from anywhere anytime, tell me.”
“When do I tell you?”
“As soon as you’re sure.”
“Before they leave?”
“Don’t worry,” Andes said. “Nobody’s killing you here.”
Tony Hastings pushed back in the classroom chair, trying to relax so as to breathe. He remembered the shivering Sharon climbing to her Village flat. A door opened and a policeman came in followed by four men. They stood in bright light in front of the blackboard. Tony Hastings looked at them bewildered.
The first man was big. He wore a red T-shirt stretched tight around his chest and had a round droopy face with blond fuzzy hair and a small mustache. The second man, not so big, wore a checked flannel shirt and had a bony face, calculating eyes, a blond forelock down his forehead. The third man, about the same size as the second, had glasses with large black frames, sparse dark hair and a bushy black mustache. He wore a jump suit and his face was puffy. The fourth man was short and scrawny. He wore an old shabby suitcoat without a tie and had silver rimmed glasses. Tony Hastings did not recognize any of them.
He sat a long time studying them, trying to remember. The men with their hands behind their backs grew restive, shifting weight from one foot to the other. The two with glasses looked at some mystic vision above his head in the back of the room. The blond man with the bony face glared as if trying to figure out who he was, while the big one with the droopy face darted furtive glances around the room. Guilty—but no one Tony had ever seen.
Faced with this unfamiliar four, Tony could no longer remember Ray or Lou or Turk, though their images had burned in his living thoughts for six months. He tried to bring them back. Could Ray have been as big as the big blond man? Never mind the mustache, could he put on so much weight in six months? Or the man with the bony face? Gradually he brought back to mind a rudimentary Ray, recovered the bald forehead, restored the triangular face, the big teeth in the small mouth. And the large intimidating eyes. So Ray at least was not here. What about Lou, who had led him down the woody road and forced him out of the car where the bodies of his wife and daughter were soon to be dumped? What would Lou look like if his black beard were shaved off? Rule out Lou. What of Turk? He remembered Turk’s glasses, but not dark framed like these. If Turk grew a mustache? Tony Hastings was beginning to sweat. He had not paid enough attention to Turk, shadowed by his more vivid companions.
He thought: the man with the dark framed glasses might be Turk. He began to see familiarity in him, as if he had known him once. A long time ago. But not definitely, not with the click Vanesco needed. Though Tony Hastings thought he knew that man, he could not remember Turk. All he had left of Turk was a generic image, man with iron rimmed glasses.
He heard Bobby Andes breathing heavily beside him. One of the men in front muttered, “Jesus!”
The bony man said, “If it takes you this long to decide, it’s no case.”
Now Tony was sure the man with the dark framed glasses was Turk. On the other hand, he could not remember Turk, therefore he could not be sure. Since making a false identification was worse than making none, he sighed and said, “I’m sorry.”
Bobby Andes hissed. “Take them out,” Vanesco said.
Bobby Andes flung his clipboard on the floor. “For God’s sake, man!” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
Vanesco was mild. “It’s all right. If you can’t be sure, it’s better to pass.”
“There goes our whole shittin case,” Andes said. To Vanesco: “This means I can’t have him, right?”
“That’s up to you. If you’ve got the evidence.”
Bobby Andes said: “Fuck!”
Tony said, “There’s a faint possibility—”
“What?”
“There’s one guy who just might, I couldn’t be sure.”
“You want to bring him back, bring him back!”
“Wait,” Vanesco said.
“I’m not sure, that’s the problem.”
“One? Bring em back!”
“Wait,” Vanesco said. “Which one, Tony?”
“The third one, glasses and mustache. If he’s changed his glasses and grown a mustache.”
Bobby Andes and Captain Vanesco looked at each other for a long moment.
“Which one would he be? Ray? Lou?”
“I’m not saying he is. I’m very unsure. If he is one, he’d be the one they called Turk.”
“Turk.”
“And the others?”
“The others are out.”
Vanesco asked, “Would you be willing to make a positive identification of this Turk?”
“I said I can’t. I can’t be sure. The only thing makes me think he’s Turk is you brought me here to identify them. You have some reason for connecting them with the case.”
Vanesco and Bobby looked at each other. Vanesco shook his head and said, “Not enough.”
Going out the door he put one hand on Bobby’s shoulder, the other on Tony’s, like a father. “Think of it this way. It’s a start. You’ll have to develop more evidence.” To Tony he said, “Don’t feel bad. It’s hard to form an image in the dark.”
Bobby Andes drove Tony Hastings back to the Albany airport. He was angry. “You sure let me down, baby,” he said. They drove for miles along the valley floor saying nothing.
“I couldn’t be certain,” Tony said.
“Yeah.”
Bobby Andes said, “The guy you said ‘might’ be Turk. Would you like to know who he is?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Steve Adams, boy. That’s the guy whose fingerprints were on your trunk. That’s the circumstantial fact, he put his fucking hands on your car, and you never saw him before.”
Steve Adams, man in the picture: long hair to the shoulder, beard like a prophet. They sure do change. The original Turk so little distinguished that Tony could remember only the generic glasses was much more ordinary than either of the Steve Adamses.
Maybe Steve Adams’s fingerprints had been put on the trunk at some other time, by a pump man in a gas station.
“Want to know the rest?” A sneer in Andes’s voice.
“Yes of course.”
“They was three guys trying to make off with a car from a used car lot. One got away. Fingerprints turn up this Steve Adams, wanted by me. If you’d identified him, they would have extradited him to me.”
Later Bobby Andes broke another silence. “How can you develop more evidence when the witness don’t cooperate?”
“I do want to cooperate.”
Let him out at the departure doors. “I doubt if I’ll see you again,” Andes said. “I don’t see much future in this case.”
Tony Hastings bent down to the car window, wanting to shake his hand, but Bobby Andes drove off too quick. In the plane Tony felt sure: the man in the dark rimmed glasses was Turk.
FOUR
Bathroom. Susan Morrow puts the manuscript down, goes upstairs. Music fights in the house. Through the closed study door, American commerce, a teary male voice trying to sell her little daughter the joys of cars and beer. Upstairs, Parsifal, ceremonial, exotic, music as perfume.
“Rosie, go to bed!”
Pursuing the murderers, a new direction in Tony’s story, a complication. Susan’s glad of that. She sympathizes with Tony’s difficulty identifying Turk, and the scene embarrasses her as if it were her fault. How people recognize each other fills her with wonder. She confused the man selling storm windows with her neighbor Gelling, yet knew Elaine at the airport even though she has turned into a sphere. Back in the living room she knocks Martha off the manuscript again. There’s another uncomfortable undertow below her reading, residue of suppressed thought, or else it’s the same one still. She wishes it would go away.