Anatomy of Fear

15

I didn’t see nothing.” The old lady, Mrs. Adele Rubenstein, reminded me of my Grandma Rose. She pursed her lips together and cherry red lipstick snaked its way into whistle lines like sidewalks cracking in an earthquake. “The police, they already asked, and I told them. I didn’t see a thing.” She glanced up at Terri Russo. “You don’t even wear a uniform.”

“I already explained that, ma’am. I’m a detective. We don’t wear uniforms.”

The old lady shrugged and made another face. Russo was getting nowhere.

“This is important to the investigation, ma’am. Anything-”

“I told you, there’s nothing. I was a block away and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I saw a man leaning over a man, and that’s it. I can’t tell you anything else. You want I should make it up?” She folded her arms across her chest.

I stepped between Russo and the old woman and offered up my best “nice Jewish boy” smile.

“Tell you what, Mrs. R, you mind if I call you that?”

The old lady shrugged and I could see that my smile hadn’t quite done it. I’d have to drag out the big guns. “My mother,” I said, “Judith Epstein, always says-”

“Epstein?”

“Yes,” I said. “From Forest Hills. My father was Spanish, but my mother’s a hundred percent Jewish.”

Adele Rubenstein looked at me for the first time. “You understand that makes you Jewish. Your father-” She waved an arthritic hand. “He doesn’t matter. The line is through the mother. You’re Jewish, and that’s that.”

“Of course. I know that.”

“So, you had a bar mitzvah?”

“Huge affair, relatives, friends, friends of friends, the whole mishpucheh.” I figured if I was lying I might as well give myself a big party, the whole nine yards. “We had a chopped-liver mold like you wouldn’t believe. Like a piece of art. It was a sin to eat it.”

“And your father, he didn’t mind?”

“Oh, my father…” I went for the home run. “He converted.”

“Call me Adele,” she said, her face one big smile.

Russo gave me a look.

“Adele,” I said. “Let’s make this fun. You tell me everything you can remember and I’ll draw it. I do this with my grandmother all the time.” I didn’t bother to tell her it was with my Spanish grandmother because I knew she’d assume I meant my Jewish one. My abeula would be the same way. She considered me a hundred-percent Spanish. “And call me Nathan.”

“A beautiful name.”

“Yeah,” I said. “My grandmother loves it. So, here’s what I want you to do, Adele. First, get comfortable, sit back and take a deep breath.”

Adele Rubenstein inhaled deeply and sagged into her plastic-covered couch.

We were in the living room of the brownstone she and her husband, Sam, the blind man, had been living in since 1950, and it looked it. Danish-modern coffee table, chipped; faded, overstuffed ultra-suede armchairs; a Formica dinette set with red vinyl-covered chairs.

“Okay, Nathan,” she said. “I’m ready.”

I opened my pad. “So you were on the street-”

“With Sam. It was our evening shpatzir, a walk. It’s good for Sam, the fresh air. The man is a hermit. He’d sit home and watch TV all day if I didn’t make him go out. I say to him, ‘Sam, you’re blind, what can you be watching?’ It doesn’t matter to him, he says, he likes to listen. He watches the old shows, which he remembers from before he went blind, kaynahorah. He says he can picture them, but I’m not so sure. His favorite is that one about the men in the war camp, Hogan’s something or other. To think they made a show about such a thing.” She shook her head and I took it as my chance to break in.

“So you said you saw a man leaning over the victim, the man who was shot.”

“Oh, such a terrible thing. Right there, on the street, in our neighborhood.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The man who was shot, he was colored, but a nice man. I’d seen him before and he always smiled and said hello. And good-looking, you shouldn’t know from it, like Sidney Poitier. You know Sidney Poitier? He’s before your time. A wonderful actor. He won the Oscar. Lilies of the…Valley, the movie was called, or something like that. The first colored man to win. I know they don’t like that term, colored. But I don’t understand it. When I was growing up I had plenty of friends who were colored, and they didn’t mind being called colored. They ate in my house, everything. To my mother a person was a person. You know what I’m saying, Nathan?”

“Yes. I know exactly what you mean.” I took a deep breath. This was not going to be so easy.

Russo was smiling, enjoying herself a little at my expense.

“Close your eyes and try to picture exactly what you saw. I’ll ask you questions and you try to answer with two or three words. You think you can do that, Adele?”

“Why not?”

“Good. First question. Did you hear anything? A shot, maybe?”

“I don’t think so, but this is Brooklyn, and the traffic, I don’t have to tell you, it keeps me up half the night. I said to Sam just the other day, Sam-”

“Just a few words, Adele, remember?”

“Oh, of course. No shot. I didn’t hear a shot. Is that short enough, Nathan?”

“Perfect. So the first thing you saw was one man leaning over another, is that right?”

“Not exactly. He wasn’t leaning. He was just standing there. And I said to Sam, ‘Sam, I think someone is hurt.’”

“Why did you say that?”

“Nathan, forgive me. This will be more than two words, but it was obvious. There was a man lying on the ground and he wasn’t moving. What would you say?”

“You’re right, Adele. So, the man who was standing, was he a big man?”

“It’s hard to say.” Adele pursed her lips. “He had on a coat, a long coat.”

I glanced over at Terri and we exchanged a look. “That’s great.” I went back to the sketch I’d made after talking with the last victim’s wife and asked her to picture what she’d seen.

“We were walking, like I said, and I looked down the street and I saw them. I couldn’t understand it,” she said. “One man standing while the other one is lying on the ground, not moving. But then, when we got closer and I saw…” She clasped a hand to her cheek and rocked her head. “Oy vey iz mir. Terrible. That poor man. I could see he was dead. He was just lying there. Awful. A shondah. And his poor wife. I saw her later, when the police came. Awful.”

She stopped and I tried to see it too, images starting to come together in my mind. “You mentioned the man’s wife; how did you know it was his wife?

“Because the police were questioning me and she was there being questioned too, poor thing.” Adele Rubenstein leaned toward me and whispered, “They were one of those mixed marriages. Very common these days. Me, personally, I have nothing against it, but what about the children? It can’t be easy for them.”

I didn’t bother to remind her that she was talking to a half-breed because she’d already accepted me as one of the flock. But it struck me that no one had mentioned that pertinent piece of information-that the black victim had a white wife. I glanced over at Terri, then at Adele. “So let’s go back to what you saw?”

“What else could there be?”

“You never know, Adele.” I patted her arm and asked her to close her eyes, which she did. “As you got closer, did the standing man see you?”

“He…” She was squinting, looking inward and reliving it, the pars orbitalis muscles of her cheeks flicking under her loose flesh, an anxious grimace setting in.

“Just relax, Adele. I’m right here with you. You’re safe. Now, think back to the standing man.”

“One minute he was there, the next-” She shook her head.

“It’s okay.” I touched her arm again. “Stay with the picture in your mind, a man standing over the dead man. Trust it, Adele.”

She let out a breath and her facial muscles relaxed with it.

“Now tell me, did you see his face?”

“Yes. No. I saw something, but…I’m not seeing it now.”

“Take your time.”

And she did. Two full minutes passed, me staring at Adele Rubenstein’s wrinkled punim, as my Grandma Rose would call it.

“Adele, are you with me?”

She nodded.

“Remember, you’re perfectly safe now, but I need you to go back to that street. You’re taking a walk. Sam is by your side. You look down the street and you see the two men-”

“Yes…”

“You’re getting closer now. The standing man looks up and sees you coming-and you see him.” I saw her expression change, no longer afraid, her incisivi labii muscles puckering her lips with determination. “His face,” I said. “You can see it, I know you can.”

“Yes! I see it! He was colored. Just like the dead man! No, wait, wait. That wasn’t it. He wasn’t colored at all. I’m wrong. I’m dead wrong. I see it now. He was wearing a mask!”

“Tell me about the mask.”

“It was a knit one, not like on Halloween, but the kind you can pull down over your face, with the holes in it.”

“A ski mask?”

“That’s it exactly! He had on a ski mask.”

“Totally covering his face?”

“Total.”

I spent a minute adding that to my drawing.

“Have a look at this, okay?” I turned my pad around.

“Oy vey.” Adele Rubenstein shivered and rubbed her arms. “Goose bumps. I’ve got goose bumps. You’re a regular Houdini, you know that, Nathan? It’s like a photograph, you made.” She pointed an arthritic finger at my sketch. “That’s the man. That’s the man I saw.”

Terri and I were out on the street heading to the spot where the victim had been slain.

“Sorry if I stepped on your toes in there. I just thought-”

“No, it was okay. You were good, the way you drew it out of her. It’s like you’ve got your own kind of interrogation technique.”

“It sort of evolved over the years. I’ve been dealing with witnesses for a long time.”

“Well, it worked.” She smiled. “I’m just sorry I missed your bar mitzvah. I do a damn good hora.”

“Too bad I missed it too. Never had one. My mother’s totally assimilated, and my father-”

“Juan the Just.”

I stopped and turned toward her. “You know about my father?”

“Only what I’ve read. That was his nickname, right?”

“What the cops called him, but I didn’t find out until-”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. Must have been tough, losing your dad so young.”

I didn’t want to talk about it and turned the conversation around. “What about you?”

“What about me?” she said, her outer borough accent going a bit harsh.

“I hear your father’s a cop too.”

Her eyebrows pulled together and the corners of her mouth turned down, a combination sad-disgust face, a blend, as Ekman would call it. “He’s retired, but still alive, if you call staring at the TV all day alive. Maybe he should come and watch with Sam the blind man.”

“I hear the feds are coming in.”

She nodded, the disgust factor lifting her upper lip. “That’s right.”

“So, we wasting our time?”

“The case is a collaboration,” she said, disgust in her voice matching her face. “And I’m still working it. By the way, there’s a total media blackout around this.”

“Isn’t it a little late for that? All three murders have been on page one.”

“All three unrelated murders. Get it? Nobody but Hollywood likes a serial killer.”

“The media is going to get it from somewhere. They always do.”

“Just not from us, okay?”

“Wouldn’t tell my mother.”

“You’ve got a mother, Rodriguez?” Russo smiled. “By the way, and you’re going to love this. The G has given the case a code name. They’re calling it-and the unsub-are you ready?-the Sketch Artist.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Afraid not. The G loves their code names.”

“The newspapers are going to love it too.”

“When they get it,” she said.

We had reached the corner where Harrison Stone had been shot and killed. I glanced at the warehouse that ended the street in a dead end, then down at the concrete. I could make out a few places where it was stained darker, possibly from blood, and a shadow slid across my unconscious.

“You mind if I try and draw something?”

“That’s why you’re here. You want me to take a walk, or-?”

“Just give me a few minutes.”

I watched Terri walk toward the corner, her gait determined, but with a slight swaying of her hips, sexy without trying. Then I stopped looking and opened my pad.

I drew for about ten or fifteen minutes.

It was the same shadowy figure in the long coat and ski mask. Something more of the face had materialized, though I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t inventing it. Maybe I’d allowed the witch doctor concept to go to my head.

Terri leaned in for a look. “Wow, you’re fast, Rodriguez.”

“You have to be in my line of work. No agonizing over perfection allowed if you want to get something on paper before it fades from the witness’s memory. “Could be I’m seeing what the witnesses planted in my head.”

“Well, I didn’t hear Adele Rubenstein say anything about the unsub’s eyes. Did Acosta’s wife?”

“No. But there was the other eye I drew. It’s in my mind, but…” I didn’t know where it had come from, and I said so.

“Could be that transference thing you talk about.”

“Could be. But it’s just an eye. Not enough for an ID.”

“Maybe not,” said Terri, looking up at me. “But it’s a start.”