commission.”
“It’s what I said on the telephone,” Prescott answered. “I want a picture of a man I describe to you.”
“Who is he?”
“My business is finding people who have done bad things,” he said.
“I didn’t ask about business,” she said testily. “I asked about him.”
“He’s a young guy, late twenties, probably. He gets paid to kill people. I’ve seen him, watched him for a couple of hours before I knew who he was. Now his image is in my mind, and I want you to put it into a picture.”
“If you found your way here, someone must have told you about me. You must know that I’m always pretty busy,” she said. “What made you think I would do it?”
Prescott said, “I asked people who was the best, not who needed the commission.” He added carefully, “I checked with galleries to find out what they get for your work. Of course I would expect to pay much more for —”
“I don’t want to talk about money just yet.” She stared at Prescott’s eyes. “You can see him, still?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Yes,” he said. “A few times. I’ve been doing pretty well at getting to know him.”
She kept her gaze on him, unblinking, but she was no longer focused on his eyes. “All right. We’ll start it and settle the price later, when I decide what it is.”
“When?”
She seemed to think the question was beneath answering. She sat down on a couch, pulled her feet under her, picked up a sketch pad and pencil from the end table, and began to work as she spoke. “Let’s start with general outline, simplest stuff. You talk, I’ll listen.”
Prescott sat in the armchair facing her. “His hair is straight, dark brown. His forehead is high and narrow, but shaped, so you can tell there’s a very slight ridge where the eyebrows are that disappears as you move in above the nose. His chin has no cleft, but it comes out a little in a slight horizontal oval, the way some chins with clefts do. The nose is thin and narrow, but the nostrils have a slight flare to them.” She was sketching furiously as he spoke, and he could tell that his curiosity was going to make this experience miserable. He added, “His ears are small, kind of rounded, and close to his head.”
“Eyes big or small?”
“Average, and not particularly close-set, either.”
“Tell me about his mouth.”
“It’s narrow, with the lower lip a little bit thicker than the upper—not red or overly full, or strange.”
“How about this part of his face, right here?” She put one hand across her face just above her mouth to touch both cheekbones at once lightly, with thumb and forefinger.
“Only slightly wider than the rest of the face, tapering gradually to the chin.”
She worked in silence for a few minutes while Prescott began to feel the curiosity tormenting him again. Then she stood up, spun the pad around, and stuck the pencil in his hand. “Here. Fix the lines where they’re wrong.”
He looked at the picture in surprise. “Me? I’ll ruin it.”
“So ruin it. This is just a preliminary step to get the shapes and sizes of things right. Study your memory and make marks. Too wide, too narrow? Eyes too big, whatever.” She tossed a gum eraser onto the pad in his lap. “Take your time.”
He was disconcerted. The drawing already looked enough like the man to be almost recognizable. He closed his eyes and brought back the image, watched the man sitting behind the console in the lighted lobby, his face unconcerned, at ease while he waited to kill his companion. Prescott began to make lines, faint and tentative at first, then more sure and bold when he saw that the lines made the resemblance clearer.
While he worked, he was aware of her. She was moving around in the kitchen area, moving things, opening cupboards and closing them. After a while he smelled coffee, and she appeared with a big tray that had two cups and a thermos pot, and several kinds of tea cakes. She set it on a table nearby.
She looked over his shoulder. “Good. Very, very good. Leave it now and have some coffee.” She pointed at the table. “You don’t strike me as the tea-cake type, but they won’t hurt you.” She poured him a cup of coffee and went to the couch to take up the pad. She used the gum eraser and pencil and worked on the drawing.
He said, “This isn’t what I expected.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “You could have gone to a police composite artist if you had wanted something simple. You went to a lot of trouble to find a real portrait painter.”
“I mean the way you go about it.”
“This isn’t the way it’s done, but this isn’t a normal portrait,” she said. She looked up and noticed he was surveying the huge loft. “You like my studio?”
“Artists all seem to be nesters. I’ve seen a few studios that are better than anything the owner ever made to sell.” He frowned. “That’s not you.”
She chuckled. “It’s a sick indulgence—something you do when you need to work but can’t do anything right. Maybe if I add a skylight, the shadows over here will be gone. Maybe if I move the wall over here in a little bit, I’ll have a small corner that glows just right. Then everything will work.” She spun the sketch again. Now the lines that he had made had been refined, and had become the new boundaries of the face.
He stared at it. “That’s closer.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at the picture, then propped up the pad so it faced him. “Let’s have some of those cakes while you get used to him. I want more lines as soon as you see something that’s wrong, remember something you forgot.” She sat at the table with him. “How did you get to chasing a killer around? Is it personal?”
He shook his head. “Nothing as honest and dignified as that. It’s something I fell into a while back.”
“How?” she asked.
“Process of elimination,” he said. He picked up the pad and began working on it again. “I started out wanting to be a great man, but then I noticed that every time there was a great man, somebody would lay the crosshairs on his forehead. Then I figured I’d be a saintly man. But it meant I would have to deny myself all the things my mama wouldn’t have approved of, and end up getting burned at a stake or something. Then I thought I’d settle for being a good man. But no matter how hard I applied myself to it, I couldn’t detect that I was getting any better than anybody else. In those days you had to go into the service, so I did. After a couple of years I got out and had nothing to do. I got a job at a detective agency, then started my own. I solved a couple of cases, and got a reputation. At that point, either I could keep making very good money doing that, or I could go start all over again at something I wasn’t even good at. So I kept on.” He handed the drawing back to Cara Lee Satterfield. “How about you? How did you get to be a famous portrait artist?”
She went to work with eraser and pencil again. “It’s a lot like your story.” She looked at him with half-lidded eyes, then down again at the pad. “Except that mine is true. I came up from Virginia twenty years ago. I needed to draw, and I needed money. I live in a century when representational art is something that’s only in style among people who wear cheese hats to football games and watch pro wrestling on TV. So I did odd jobs—quickie sketches at amusement parks, greeting cards, witness sketches for the police.”
He looked around him at the loft, then back at her. “Something else happened to both of you.”
“Both?”
“You and this building.”
She grinned as she worked. “I bought this place because I couldn’t afford SoHo, which was where artists were living then. This was a hellhole, a place where transients and addicts hung out. There had been four or five fires. I got it cheap. I made it secure so nobody could get in, fixed it up a little, and went to work. Over the years, the rent in SoHo got too expensive for artists, and most of them moved in around me anyway. In the meantime, I discovered that no matter how rich and sophisticated you are, you don’t want your portrait to be abstract. You want realism, with ten years lopped off.” She showed him the portrait.
“That’s close,” he said. “Really close. I don’t know what I could do to it.”
“Then let’s talk ethnic stereotypes.”
“Stereotypes?”
She said, “Nice people don’t. But all we’re talking about here is looks. You look the way the genes your
