A Ticket to the Boneyard

Page 13

"You still wouldn't necessarily find sperm up her ass, not unless you were looking for it."
I shrugged. "It doesn't matter," I said. "For Christ's sake, we'd have been able to say if the husband had any blood on him besides his own."
"Yeah, we'd have probably done that. Except we tend to fuck up a lot too, Matt. You've been away from it long enough to forget that side of it."
"Maybe."
He leaned forward, stubbed out his cigarette. "Every time I quit these things," he said, "I'm a heavier smoker when I go back to them. I think quitting's dangerous to my health. If that semen turns out not to be the husband's, you figure they'll open the case?"
"I don't know."
"Because they're light years away from having a case against him. You can't prove he was in Ohio. Where is he now, you got any idea?"
I shook my head. "I called the DMV. He doesn't own a car and he doesn't have a license."
"They just told you all that?"
"They may have assumed I had official status."
He gave me a look. "Of course you weren't impersonating a police officer."
"I didn't identify myself as such."
"You want to look up the statute, it says you can't act in such a manner as will lead people to believe you're a peace officer."
"That's with intent to defraud, isn't it?"
"To defraud or to induce people to do for you that which they wouldn't do otherwise. Doesn't matter, I'm just being a hard-on. No car, no license. Of course he could be the unlicensed driver of an unregistered vehicle. Where's he living?"
"I don't know."
"He's not on parole so he doesn't have to tell anybody. What's his last known address?"
"A hotel on upper Broadway, but that was more than twelve years ago."
"I don't suppose they held his room."
"I called there," I said. "Just on the offchance."
"And he's not registered."
"Not under his own name."
"Yeah, that's another thing," he said. "False ID. He could have a full set. Twelve years in the joint, he's got to know a lot of dirty people. He's been out since when, the middle of July? He could have everything from an American Express card to a Swiss passport by now."
"I thought of that."
"You're pretty sure he's in town."
"Has to be."
"And you think he's gonna make a try for the other girl. What's her name again?"
"Elaine Mardell."
"And then he'll nail you for the hat trick." He gave it some thought. "If we had an official request from Massillon," he said, "we could maybe put a couple of uniforms on it, try to turn him up. But that's if they open the case and issue a warrant for the fucker."
"I think Havlicek would like to do that," I said. "If he could run it past his chief."
"He'd like to while the two of you are eating rigatoni and talking football. Now you're five hundred miles away and he's got a million other things that need doing. It gets easier for him to say the hell with it. Nobody likes to open a closed file."
"I know."
He got a cigarette from his pack, tapped it against his thumbnail, put it back in the pack. He said, "What about a photo? They got one at Dannemora?"
"From his intake interview eight years ago."
"You mean twelve, don't you?"
"Eight. He was at Attica first."
"Right, you said so."
"So, the only photograph they have is eight years old. I asked if they could send me a copy. The guy I spoke to seemed doubtful. He wasn't sure whether that was policy or not."
"I guess he didn't somehow assume you were a police officer."
"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."