Daniel's was ninety proof. Wild Turkey was 101.
Funny what sticks in your mind.
Maybe I should have picked up a fifth, or even a quart.
I put the bottle down and walked over to the window again. I felt curiously calm, and at the same time I was all hyped up. I looked out across the street, then turned and looked at the bottle again. I switched on the TV and clicked the dial from channel to channel, not even noticing what I was looking at. I went around the dial two or three times and turned the set off.
The phone rang. I stood there for a moment, looking at it as though I couldn't figure out what it was, or what to do about it. It rang again. I let it ring a third time before I picked it up and said hello.
'Matt, this is Tom Havlicek.' It took me a moment to place the name, and I got it just as he added, 'In Massillon. Beautiful downtown Massillon, isn't that what they say?'
Did they? I didn't know how to respond to that, but fortunately I didn't have to. He said, 'I just thought I'd give you a call, find out what kind of progress you were making.'
Great progress, I thought. Every couple of days he kills somebody.
The NYPD doesn't have a clue what's going on, and I stand around with my thumb up my ass.
What I said was, 'Well, you know how it goes. It's a slow process.'
'You don't have to tell me. I guess that's one thing's the same the whole world over. You put the puzzle together a piece at a time.' He cleared his throat. 'Why I called, I might have a piece of the puzzle.
There's a night clerk at a motel on Railway Avenue who recognized your sketch.'
'How did he happen to see it?'
'She. Little bitty woman, looks like your grandmother and has a mouth on her would shame a sailor. She took one look at him and knew him right away. Only problem was matching him to the right registration card, but she found him. He didn't call himself Motley. No surprise there.'
'No.'
'Robert Cole is what he put down. That's not far from the alias you said he used in New York. You had it written down on the sketch but I don't have it handy. Ronald something.'
'Ronald Copeland.'
'That's right. For address he put a post-office box, and he put down Iowa City, Iowa. He had a car, and he put down the plate number, and the motor vehicles people in Des Moines tell me there's no such plate been issued. They say they couldn't issue such a plate because it doesn't jibe with their numbering system.'
'That's interesting.'
'I thought so,'' he said. 'Now my thinking is either he just made up the plate number or he used the one on the car he was driving, but it wasn't an Iowa tag in the first place.'
'Or both.'
'Well, sure. To take it the rest of the way, if he drove from New York he most likely had New York plates, and he might want to put down the correct plate number just in case some sharp-eyed clerk compared his car with the card he filled out. So if you were to check motor vehicles there at your end—'
'Good idea,' I said. He gave me the plate number and I copied it down, along with the name Robert Cole. 'He used an Iowa address at a local hotel here,' I remembered. 'Mason City, though. Not Iowa City. I wonder why he's fixated on Iowa.'
'Maybe he's from there originally.'
'I don't think so. He sounds like a New Yorker. Maybe he locked with somebody from Iowa in Dannemora. Tom, how did the motel clerk get to see the sketch?'
'How did she get to see it? I showed it to her.'
'I thought the case wasn't going to be reopened.'
'It wasn't,' he said. 'Still hasn't been.' He was silent for a moment.
Then he said, 'What I do on my free time's pretty much up to me.'
'You ran all over town on your own?'
He cleared his throat again. 'Matter of fact,' he said, 'I found a couple of the fellows to help out. I was the one who showed the sketch to that woman, but that was just the luck of the draw.'
'I see.'
'I don't know what good all of this is, Matt, but I thought you ought to know what showed up so far. I don't know where we go from here, if anywheres, but you'll hear from me if anything else turns up.'
I hung up and went over to the window again. On the street a couple of uniforms were in conversation with a street vendor, a black man who'd set up shop a few weeks ago in front of the florist's, selling scarves and belts and purses, and cheap umbrellas when it rained. They come over from Dakar on Air Afrique, stay five and six to a room in the Broadway hotels, and fly back to Senegal every few months with presents for the kids. They learn quick over here, and evidently their curriculum includes low-level bribery, because the two blues left this one to tend his open-air store.
Nice of Havlicek, I thought. Decent of him, putting in his own time on a case his chief wouldn't reopen, even getting some other cops to work some of their off-hours.
For all the good it would do.
I looked over at the bottle and let it draw me across the room to the dresser. The federal tax stamp ran from
