In the morning I slipped out of bed and showered and dressed, then woke her to let me out and lock up after me. She wanted to make sure I had the sketch. I held up the cardboard core from a roll of paper towels, Galindez's effort coiled within.
'Don't forget I want it back,' she said.
I told her I'd take good care of it.
'And of yourself,' she said. 'Promise?'
I promised.
I walked back to my hotel. On the way I found a copy shop that hadn't closed for the weekend and got
them to run a hundred copies of the sketch. I dropped most of them in my room, along with the original, which I'd rolled and reinserted in its cardboard sleeve. I kept a dozen or so copies and took along a batch of business cards, the ones Jim Faber had printed up for me, not the ones from Reliable. These had my name and phone number, nothing else.
I took the Broadway local uptown and got off at Eighty-sixth. My first stop was the Bretton Hall, Motley's last known address at the time of his arrest. I already knew he wasn't registered there under his own name, but I tried his picture on the man behind the desk. He studied it solemnly and shook his head.
I left the picture with him, along with one of my cards. 'Be something in it for you,' I said. 'If you can help me out.'
I worked my way up the east side of Broadway to110th Street , hitting the residential hotels on Broadway itself and on the side streets.
Then I crossed to the other side and did the same thing, working my way back down to Eighty-sixth and continuing on down to around Seventy-second Street. I stopped for a plate of black beans and yellow rice at a Cuban-Chinese lunch counter, then worked the east side of Broadway back up to where I'd started. I passed out more business cards than pictures, but I still managed to get rid of all but one of the copies of the sketch and wished I'd brought more. They'd only cost me a nickel apiece, and at that rate I could have afforded to paper the city with them.
A couple of people told me Motley looked familiar. At one welfare hotel, the Benjamin Davis on Ninety-fourth, the clerk knew him immediately.
'He was here,' he said. 'Man stayed here this summer.'
'What dates?'
'I don't know as I could say. He was here more than a couple weeks, but I couldn't tell you when he came or when he moved out.'
'Could you check your records?'
'I might could, if I recollected his name.'
'His real name's James Leo Motley.'
'You don't always get real names here. I don't suppose I have to tell you that.' He flipped to the front of the register, but the volume only went back to early September. He went into a back room and came back with the preceding volume in hand. 'Motley,' he said to himself, and started paging through the entries. 'I don't see it here. I got to say I don't think that was the name he used. I disremember his name, but I would know it if I heard it, you know what I'm saying? And when I hear Motley it don't ring no bells.'
He went through the book all the same, running his finger down the pages slowly, moving his lips slightly as he scanned the names of lodgers. The whole process drew some attention, and a couple of others, tenants or hangers-on, drifted over to see what was occupying us.
'You know this man,' the clerk said to one of them. 'Stayed here over the summer. What was the name he called hisself?'
The man he'd asked took the sketch and held it so the light fell on it. 'This ain't a photograph,' he said.
'This is like a picture somebody drawn of him.'
'That's right.'
'Yeah, I know him,' he said. 'Looks just like him. What name was you calling him?'
'Motley. James Leo Motley.'
He shook his head. 'Wasn't no Motley. Wasn't no James anything.'
He turned to his friend. 'Rydell, what was this dude's name? You remember him.'
'Oh, yeah,' Rydell said.
'So what was his name?'
'Looks just like him,' Rydell said. 'On'y his hair was different.'
'How?'
'Short,' Rydell told me. 'Short on top, on the sides, short all over.'
'Real short,' his friend agreed. 'Like maybe he used to be someplace where they give you a real short haircut.'
'Where they just use that old clippers,' Rydell said, 'and all's they do is buzz you up one side of your head and down the other. I swear I'd know his name. If I was to hear it I'd know it.'
'So would I,' the other man said.
'Coleman,' Rydell said.
