“Twenties, I think. I think he counted out ten twenties.” Someone speculated that the bills might hold a print. She remembered that she’d given some of the twenties in change later that same day to a customer who’d bought a small china dog for twelve dollars and paid for it with a hundred-dollar bill. And she’d taken a couple of twenties out of the register and spent them shopping. But there might be one of the killer’s twenties in the register, and it might have prints on it, some of which might be his, and—
It sounded like a long shot to me. But someone would have to check it out, because we were down to long shots.
She said, “He gave me the creeps.”
“Now, when you think about it?” Sussman asked. “Or at the time?”
“At the time. There was something about him. At the time I thought he was hitting on me, which I get a certain amount of, any woman does. Sometimes it’s flirting and sometimes it’s more exploratory.”
“Which was this?”
“It was somewhere in the middle, or at least that’s what it felt like, but it was distinctly creepy. It wasn’t anything he did, just the way he looked at me.” A light came into her eyes, and she shuddered. “He 170
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wanted to kill me,” she said. “There was a moment there when he was considering something, I could see it in his eyes, and I thought it was, you know, making a pass. But he had the paper knife in his hand, and he was thinking about stabbing me with it.” Sussman told her she couldn’t know that.
“Fine,” she said. “So don’t write it down. But that’s what he was doing. You think he just happened to buy the murder weapon from somebody who just happened to be the victim’s best friend?”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“He was stalking you,” I said.
“Yes, that’s exactly what he was doing.”
“Had you seen him before?”
“I don’t think so. It’s possible. He was, well, pretty ordinary looking.”
“But you can picture him in your mind?”
“I think so. You want me to sit down with a police artist?”
“If you don’t mind,” Sussman said, and she looked at him like he was crazy. Mind? Why should she mind?
The artist was of the new breed. He never picked up a pencil, just sat at a computer terminal loaded with a dedicated software program that had made sketches obsolete. He worked with her the same way a more traditional police artist would have worked, asking her were the eyebrows bushier, was there more definition in the jawline, and morphing the on-screen image accordingly. She sat next to him while he worked, answering his questions, occasionally reaching out to touch an area on the screen that seemed to her not to be right. A couple of us stood around watching and kept our mouths shut while the process continued.
When she decided that was as close as they were going to get, he saved the image and printed out half a dozen copies, and we each took one and stared long and hard at it. I certainly couldn’t recognize the son of a bitch. He looked like everybody and nobody.
One of the cops said, “There must be a million guys out there look like this.”
“Not a million,” Sussman said, “but I know what you mean.”
“He didn’t have any strong features,” Elaine said. “Or especially All the Flowers Are Dying
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weak ones, either. There was something about his eyes, but I think that was a matter of the look in them, and how are you going to get that out of a computer?”
“But the sketch resembles him?”
She frowned. “It doesn’t not resemble him,” she said.
“Meaning what exactly?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t use my eyes right, maybe I didn’t want to look at him. Maybe all I saw was the mustache, and I locked in on that and didn’t pay enough attention to the rest of his face.” A cop said, “It suits him, the mustache. I mean, you can see why he’d grow one. Makes his face look a little less generic.”
“I say thank God for the mustache,” Sussman said, “because we’re gonna braid a rope out of it and hang him with it. You did really well, Mrs. Scudder.”
“Elaine,” she said.
“Elaine, then. You did good work. The sketch may look, I don’t know, sketchy, to you, but you know how to use your eyes, and my guess is it’s closer than you think. You should see some of the sketches people come up with. We had this guy, committed a string of rapes in and around the Morris Park section of the Bronx. They put three sketches of him on the news, all in a row, and I swear you thought you were looking at three different guys. They didn’t even look like brothers.”
“They damn well looked like brothers,” one of the cops said.
“I’m gonna file on you,” Sussman told him. “Have you cited for racial insensitivity. I suppose you think you can get away with saying shit like that just because you’re black. They didn’t look like members of the same family, is that better?”
“I say arrest all three of them,” someone else said. “How can you go wrong?”
21
The Canarsie line runs east from Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street to the Rockaway Parkway stop at the corner of Rockaway and Glenwood, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. Officially it’s the L
