A Long Line of Dead Men

"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.