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 theForty-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 atKingsboroughCommunity 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.'
When he left Elaine closed the door after him and engaged all the locks. 'I feel silly doing this,' she said,
'but I've been doing it anyway.'
'There are people all over town with half a dozen locks on every door, and alarm systems and everything else. And they don't have somebody who's threatened to kill them.'
'I suppose it's comforting to know that,' she said. 'He's a nice kid, Ray. I wonder if he'll stay a cop.'
'Hard to say.'
'Was there ever anything else you wanted to be? Besides a cop?'
'I never even wanted to be a cop. It was something I drifted into, and before I was out of the Academy I realized it was what I'd been born for. But I never knew that early on. When I was a kid I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio when I grew up, but that's what every kid wanted, and I never had the moves to go with the desire.'
'You could have married Marilyn Monroe.'
'And sold coffee makers on television. There but for the grace of God.'
She carried our empty glasses into the kitchen and I trailed along behind her. She rinsed them under the tap, placed them in the strainer. 'I think I'm getting stir-crazy,' she said. 'What are you doing tonight? Do you have anyplace you have to be?'
