A Time to Scatter Stones Read online

  AT THE MORNING STAR, I considered the question while the waitress came by and took our order. Then I said, “Does she miss it? Yes, I suppose she does. She never finds herself with time on her hands, she doesn’t lack for things to do, but she took an empty storefront and turned it into a wonderful reflection of herself.”

  “Every square foot of it,” he said, “was Elaine.”

  “And she got a kick out of finding something that nobody would look twice at and revealing it to be a work of art. One of her thrift shop specials turned out to be a Paint-by-Numbers masterpiece.”

  “She didn’t spot that when she bought it?”

  “She just liked the looks of it, and the Salvation Army wanted something like fifteen or twenty dollars for it, so she wasn’t about to x-ray it. She bought it and brought it home. A week or so later a customer picked it up and said it looked to her like Paint-by-Numbers. Our girl didn’t miss a beat. ‘A perfect example of Outsider Art,’ she said. ‘This particular artist used Paint-by-Numbers as his jumping-off point. And do you see what he’s done with it?’ ”

  He nodded. “Anybody would miss moments like that,” he said.

  “She misses the action,” I said, “and the stimulation. The give and take of it. Retail can be a nightmare, you’re at the mercy of any ambulatory psychotic who walks in off the street, but she thrived on it. And once in a while she wound up working with a real artist.”

  “Jury’s still out on that.”

  “Every time she sold a sketch of yours, and every time she got you a portrait commission, you’d think she’d just won the Nobel Prize. When she decided to close the shop, even before she told the landlord, she was looking for somebody to step up and rep you.”

  “I remember how I got the news. ‘Ray, this is Johanna Huberman, she’s got a small gallery on upper Madison Avenue, and she’ll be able to represent your work far better than I can. Oh, by the way, I’ve decided to close the shop.’ ”

  “That sounds about right. Are you still with—”

  “Johanna? I am, and Elaine chose well. We’ve got good chemistry. It’s a slow way to get rich, but Jesus, Matt, I’m a professional artist. It’s how I make my living. How the hell did that happen?”

  WE SAT OVER COFFEE while I told him what he needed to know about Ellen. That didn’t include her vocational history, or how Elaine happened to know her. They were in a group together, I said, and they’d gotten friendly over the months, and the younger woman had brought her problem to Elaine.

  That problem, of course, was the putative Paul, who was transformed in the telling from a client of hers to a nut job who’d decided they were soulmates on the strength of a single dinner date. As far as she was concerned, one awkward evening was more than enough, but Paul didn’t see it that way.

  “So he’s stalking her,” he said.

  “He’s trying to. She moved out of her apartment, found another place to stay for the time being. She may have to change her phone number, but so far she hasn’t.”

  “And he calls?”

  “Early and often.”

  “She been to the police?”

  “No, and I was going to send her there but I couldn’t think what she could tell them. She doesn’t know his last name, and she’s not sure he gave her the right first name.”

  “Paul, you said.”

  “Right.”

  “Probably married,” he said. “That’d explain not giving his real name. But that doesn’t fit with the stalking, does it?”

  “You wouldn’t think so, but—”

  “But maybe it does. If he’s obsessed with her, all bets are off. There’s a word for it.”

  “Stalking?”

  “Erotomania. It’s more than an obsession, it’s the conviction that they’ve got a real relationship with the stalkee, if that’s a word. Sometimes it’s a public figure and they’ve never even met in real life. Like that woman they caught breaking into David Letterman’s house.”

  “That was a while ago.”

  “Years,” he said. “If she turned up again, I don’t know who she’d get fixated on. Colbert, I suppose. Or one of the Jimmies.”

  “Past my bedtime.”

  “Not me. I’m still a night owl, but I don’t watch talk shows anymore. I have to say I miss David Letterman.”

  “You could always break into his house,” I said. “He’d probably be happy to see you.”

  WHEN WE GOT TO the apartment, Ellen was sitting on the couch in the living room, her shoes off, wearing slacks and a sweater. I’d managed introductions by the time Elaine came in from the kitchen with a plate of shortbread cookies. Elaine told Ray how well he looked, and he told her she was as lovely as ever, and she put the plate of cookies on the coffee table, where no one paid any attention to them. Elaine told Ellen it had been worth running the shop just to be able to offer Ray’s work, and Ray told Ellen how Elaine had discovered him. “But it wasn’t like discovering America,” he said, “or a new planet.”

  Elaine told him he was modest to a fault, and he said he had a lot to be modest about, and then the air went out of the small talk. Ray unzipped his portfolio and took out a sketch pad and a pencil case, and Elaine said, “Well, you two have work to do. The light’s better in the front room.”

  When they were out of range, she said, “I hope this works. She didn’t want to come.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s afraid it won’t work. And it’ll be her fault.”

  ‘It’ll probably work just fine.”

  “I know.”

  “And it won’t be anybody’s fault if it doesn’t.”

  “I know that, too. Nobody touched the cookies.”

  “Until now,” I said, and ate one.

  “I don’t know why I feel compelled to do that.”

  “Bring out food?”

  “It’s the most Jewish thing about me. What?”

  “ ‘What?’ ”

  “You were about to say something.”

  I took another cookie. “These don’t taste particularly Jewish,” I said.

  “They’re from Pepperidge Fucking Farm, and that’s not what you were about to say.”

  “Can you think of anything I could possibly say that wouldn’t come off as either anti-Semitic or misogynistic?”

  “Not offhand,” she said.

  I COULDN’T TELL YOU when I met Ray Galindez, but I can picture him that first time, sitting at a desk in a station house, a sketch pad in one hand and a pencil in the other. Early in his career with the NYPD, he’d revealed a special talent for working with witnesses and translating their memories into detailed drawings. A lot of police artists use some version of IdentiKit, swapping eyes and lips and jawlines back and forth, until the witness is happy with the result, and there are times when that works pretty well. It’s better a lot of the time than the old-fashioned you-talk-and-I-draw method, because there aren’t all that many talented artists in blue uniforms, while just about anyone can learn how to rock an IdentiKit.

  But nobody with an IdentiKit could come anywhere near Ray Galindez.

  It wasn’t just that he was a very capable sketch artist. If you keep your eyes open you’ll see a lot of men and women with pencils and sketch books, in subway cars or coffee shops or public parks, sneaking peeks at someone across the way and trying to summon up a likeness. Sometimes I’d sneak a peek of my own, at the emerging sketch, and while there was something wrong with most of the drawings, on balance they were surprisingly good. Yes, you’d think, that’s her, all right. There’s something not quite right about the mouth, but it’s not bad.

  But they had an advantage. They were able to see the person they were attempting to draw.

  All Ray had was witnesses armed with whatever lingered in their visual memory. To get that down on paper, he had to coax that memory back to life and draw what it gave him. He had to be sensitive to the witnesses he worked with, and intuitive enough to sense what it meant when one of them said, “No, his eyebrows were angrier t
han that. Meaner.”

  Some years ago, I’d spent a fair amount of time with a resourceful serial murderer. At the time, I thought of him as a drunk trying to get sober, and a possible future friend—which is to say that he played me very effectively. When the penny dropped, I sat down with Ray and it didn’t take him long to get my false friend’s likeness on his pad, and I printed a ton of copies and flooded the city with them.

  That was relatively easy, because I had a strong visual impression of the man, and could look at his sketch pad and say what did or did not match up to the image in my mind. But Ray had the uncanny ability to draw upon memories that were hazy at best, childhood recollections with the subject’s features worn away by the years. Elaine first discovered this when she got him to draw a relative she barely remembered, a man whose face she could not manage to picture in her mind.

  She framed the result, and gave it a prominent spot in her shop, with a NOT FOR SALE tag on it. Before long she was lining up commissions for Ray, matching him with a woman whose only photo of her long-dead father had been lost in a fire. Word of mouth brought more work, including a tour de force for a Holocaust survivor, for which he dredged out memories of all her dead relatives and sketched them seated together at a dinner table.

  According to Elaine, it came out looking like a cross between a Seder in Lithuania and Leonardo’s The Last Supper. “To Mrs. Reisman,” she said, “all it looked like was family. First she couldn’t stop crying, and then she couldn’t stop kissing Ray’s hands.”

  ELAINE RETURNED TO A novel she was trying to finish, and I had another go at the Times, and I was getting bad news from the Science section about the prospects of polar bears, when Ray and Ellen joined us after a half hour or so. She wasn’t kissing his hands, but then again he hadn’t just drawn a face she longed to remember. The man who looked up from Ray’s sketch pad was one she’d have preferred to forget.

  I couldn’t judge the extent to which the drawing did or did not capture its subject. I’d never laid eyes on Paul, and had no better idea of what he looked like than I had of his actual name. The face I saw was a wide-browed oval, the eyes deep-set, the lips full, the jawline the least bit jowly. There was menace in the subject’s gaze, resolve in the set of his mouth and jaw, and no way to know how much of that was real and how much the emotional baggage Ellen brought to the table.

  But the result was the specific portrait of a specific person. IdentiKit compilations have always reminded me of Mr. Potato Head, and like most police sketches they’re a little less than the sum of their parts. This, on the other hand, appeared to have been drawn from life.

  “It’s him,” Ellen said.

  RAY WOULDN’T TAKE ANY money, not even for expenses. He said, “What, subway fare? Come on.”

  But he couldn’t escape without a Tupperware container filled with the rest of the shortbread cookies. “Otherwise Matt will eat them,” Elaine told him, “and he’s already had more than he should.”

  “Well, in that case,” Ray said.

  After he’d left, Ellen hung around long enough to eat a sandwich and marvel at how easy it had been to work with Ray, how it was like he was reading her mind with his pencil. Elaine took her downstairs, stopping three doors down to make half a dozen photocopies of Ray’s work. One was for Ellen, whom she then tucked into a cab, after first scanning the sidewalks for the man in the sketch.

  “At least this time I knew what I was looking for,” she said. By then she’d laid out the copies and Ray’s original on the coffee table, regarding each in turn as if to assess the consistency of the Xerox machine. After a moment she took the original into another room, where it would bide its time until it reached Johanna Huberman’s hands. Ideally it would wind up sharing a mat and frame with a mug shot of its subject.

  “He’s really remarkable,” she said of Ray, and I pointed out that we wouldn’t really know how remarkable he was until we got our own look at the stalker. “According to Ellen,” she said, “it’s the spitting image. Where does that expression come from, anyway?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And I don’t really care. There should be a word for apathy so profound that you don’t even bother Googling it.”

  “There probably is.”

  “But in order to know that word,” she said, “you’d have to . . . Never mind. I’m glad he took the cookies. They were good, weren’t they?”

  “I don’t suppose one or two wouldn’t fit in the container.”

  “No, they fit perfectly.”

  “Next time,” I said, “use a smaller container.”

  “He gave up the better part of a day,” she said, “and schlepped all the way in from Williamsburg—”

  “It’s not that much of a schlep.”

  “—and you begrudge the man a handful of shortbread cookies.”

  “Who knows if he even likes shortbread?”

  “Everybody likes shortbread.”

  I said, “I was just thinking that he might have been just as happy with a little cupcake.”

  “A wee bit of crumpet to go with his tea?” She considered this. “I never saw Ray as a man with a roving eye. He’s crazy about Bitsy. Or at least he used to be.”

  “Still is.”

  “Of course,” she said, “one can never lose sight of the fact that all men are swine.” She thought for a moment. “What did you pick up? Was she encouraging him?”

  “She put her hand on top of his.”

  “When?”

  “While you were packing up his cookies. They were sitting side by side—”

  “On the couch.”

  “—and his hand was on the table, palm down, and she said something and used her hands for emphasis.”

  “She does that.”

  “Most people do. And when she finished what she was saying, she put her hand on top of his.”

  “What, like this?” Her hand covered mine.

  “Like that.”

  “Or was it more like this?”

  Her hand pressed down a little on mine, and I felt a transfer of energy.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “You don’t forget how,” she mused. “Even after all these years, even if life has turned you into an old married lady, you still remember the moves. And our Ellen’s neither old nor married, and she’s been out of the game for what, about a minute and a half? Did he get the message?”

  “His eyes widened a little bit.”

  “With surprise?”

  I thought about it. “No.”

  “No, because he wasn’t surprised. Because she would have done a little of the touchy-feely when they were in front working on the sketch. But he’d see that as unconscious, part of being caught up in the process. It’d be enough to get him thinking of her in sexual terms, just in a very surfacey way, but that’s all.”

  “And then she did it again, after their work was done. And this time she did it with an audience.”

  “She did it in front of you,” she said. “But not in front of me.”

  “Because you’d be more likely to pick up on it.”

  “And because I’m her sponsor, or the next thing to it, and she didn’t want me to catch her acting like a whore.”

  “You really think that’s what she was doing?”

  “Oh, no question. A refined whore, though. I mean, what did she do? Touch the back of his hand? It’s not as if she grabbed him by the dick.”

  AN HOUR LATER, AFTER I’d put in some time at the computer while she returned to her novel, it occurred to me to wonder why.

  “Why touch his hand? To get him interested.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “but why? You think she wants to go to bed with him?”

  “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t.” She marked her place, closed her book. “Part of it’s reflex,” she said. “Even before she started turning tricks, probably long before it ever occurred to her, she learned how to relate to guys.”

  “Touch their hands.”

  “Get them
interested,” she said. “Touching is one way to do that.”

  “So that’s all it is?”

  She shook her head. “She’d want him to like her. She’d want him on her side. He came here to do us a favor, but he was also doing her a favor, and he might do a better job or go an extra mile if he liked her.”

  “And would he?”

  “Not consciously,” she said, “but sure. Didn’t you extend yourself more for the clients you liked? I don’t mean sexually. You liked some of the people you worked for more than some of the others.”

  “Early on,” I remembered, “I preferred to work for clients I didn’t like. Because it wouldn’t bother me as much to disappoint them. But I guess you’re right. You work harder for the ones you like.”

  “It’s only natural.”

  And, I wondered, had she herself worked harder to please some johns than others? Slipped with them into a deeper level of intimacy? Played her part with more enthusiasm? Held in reserve certain acts she’d only perform with the chosen ones?

  I didn’t ask. I could have, and if the matter obsessed me I probably would have, but I didn’t feel the need. The years she’d spent in the profession had been a natural outgrowth of the girl she’d been, even as they’d since become a part of who she was now.

  I said, “I can see her wanting to motivate him with a little intimacy. But afterward the sketch was finished and he was on his way home to wife and children—”

  “A reward for a job well done.”

  “Oh.”

  “And to show that she still liked him even after there was no longer anything to get from him. And I was out of the room.”

  “While I’d never notice.”

  “Sure you would. You’re a detective, you’re observant by nature. And if you noticed, that was all to the good. Because it gave her a chance to flirt with you at one remove. ‘I’m a kind of a sexy lady, and I like guys, and if the circumstances were right it’d be your hand I was touching.’ ”

  I didn’t say anything, and I guess I was looking off into the middle distance, because she said, “What?”

  “I was thinking of the little fantasy we shared yesterday.”