train. Not too long ago it was the LL, or Double-L. Then someone in a position of authority (though not, I shouldn’t think, a whole lot of authority) decided to do away with all the double letters. The GG train became the G and the LL became the L. Meanwhile the AA became the K, because there already was an A, and eventually disappeared entirely. I don’t know who makes these decisions, or what he could possibly do for a living if he ever lost that job.
I don’t often have occasion to take the L, and when I do I invariably think of my father, who died riding it. He stood on the platform between two cars, probably to sneak a smoke, and he fell, and the wheels passed over him. He was probably drunk when it happened, so you could blame the drink for it, or the tobacco, if you wanted to stretch a point. When I was a boy, of course, I blamed the train.
The L train runs along Fourteenth Street and under the East River into Brooklyn. Eventually it comes up above ground and runs as an elevated line, as do most trains when they reach the outer boroughs, but we didn’t stay on it that long. We got off at the first stop in Brooklyn, which is Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. We walked north on Bedford past several numbered streets until we came to an attractive All the Flowers Are Dying
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three-story house in a row of attractive three-story houses. Once they’d all been covered up with asphalt or aluminum siding, but in recent years they’d all been restored, and Elaine thought they were adorable and the whole neighborhood charming.
“I could live here,” she said.
She hadn’t been out here before. I had, though not recently, and I was able to pick out Ray and Bitsy’s house without having to look up the number in my book. Ray must have seen us coming; the door opened before I could knock on it, and as we followed him into the living room his wife, Bitsy, emerged from the kitchen with a plate of cookies and a carafe of coffee. It was Puerto Rican coffee, dark and rich, and I’d had a yen for a cup ever since I saw the Cafe Bustelo sign in the shop window on Amsterdam Avenue.
Ray told us we were both looking terrific, and Elaine asked about their kids, and Elaine and I each took a cookie, although she could only manage a bite of hers. Ray said, “Well, we could sit and talk for hours, but I guess we should get down to it, huh?” and Elaine nodded and stood up and went to the room on the third floor where he had his studio.
I sat down and reached for another cookie, and Bitsy said, “There’s more in the kitchen. First time I tried this recipe. I have to say I think they came out pretty good, and they couldn’t be simpler to make. That coffee okay?”
“It’s a lot more than okay.”
“Matt? Is she all right?”
“Her best friend was killed yesterday.”
“Aw, gee, that’s terrible. But, you know, I’m kind of relieved to hear it, in a way, because I was afraid, you know, that she might be ill.”
“When she feels something it shows in her face.”
“Well, besides that. Her energy’s way off. Like her aura’s a mess.”
“You can see people’s auras?”
“Not exactly see,” she said. “It’s more I get a feeling. My mother was the same way. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s a load of crap. But losing a best friend, and you say she was murdered? That would do it, all right. That’s a terrible thing.” 174
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We had turned right when we left the stationhouse, but before we’d gone ten steps she stopped in her tracks and said, “Ray.” We know a few Rays, including Ray Gruliow, whose house is right there in the Sixth Precinct, but I didn’t need a last name to know which one she meant.
Ray Galindez was a kid from El Barrio who became a cop and then discovered his true calling when they found out he could draw and made a police artist out of him. The IdentiKit software didn’t take his job away, because they’d have been happy to train him to use it, but it took the joy out of it for him.
Elaine thought his ability amounted to far more than a knack or a job skill, that he was in fact a talented artist who possessed the ability to bond with his subjects and channel their visions into black-and-white reality. Working together, the two of them had produced a por-trait of her long-dead father, and she went on to get him assignments drawing other people’s dead relatives, including those of a Holocaust survivor who’d lost her whole family in the camps. It had been a remarkably cathartic experience for Elaine, who’d called the process the equivalent of a year or two of therapy. I don’t know what it was like for the others who tried it, but nobody ever asked for a refund.
Because Elaine took him seriously, Ray began to take his art seriously himself. She showed his work at her shop, sold a few pieces, and managed to get a neighborhood paper, the Chelsea-Clinton News, to run a review. That got him some more work, and with Bitsy’s encouragement he quit the NYPD and set up shop as an artist. They already had a house they were renovating in Williamsburg, which by then was becoming the ideal place for an artist to live, and he managed to pick up some commercial work that helped pay the mortgage each month.
Bitsy, a trained bookkeeper, built a practice in the neighborhood, crunching numbers for people who were better at mixing colors, and that kept the lights and phone on and the freezer stocked, and let her work at home and be a full-time mother in the bargain, with plenty of time for baking cookies.
The IdentiKit software is pretty decent, and enables anyone with a All the Flowers Are Dying
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decent eye and a brief course of instruction to function competently as a police artist. But Ray did something no amount of training or programming could achieve, somehow making his drawing hand function as an extension of his subject’s mind. Elaine wasn’t satisfied with what had come out of the squad room computer, and if there was a way to improve on it, we’d find it in Williamsburg.
