“When did you buy them?” Byrnes asked.

  “About two weeks ago. A hockshop on Crichton. You can check it.”

  “We already have,” Byrnes said. “We know all about the lollipop.”

  “Huh?”

  “You went into the shop sucking a lollipop.”

  “Oh.” Samalson looked sheepish. “I had a sore throat. It’s good to keep your mouth wet when you got a sore throat. That’s why I had the lollipop. There’s no law against that.”

  “And you had these glasses until last Sunday, is that right? And last Sunday you claim you lost them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sure you didn’t loan them to anybody?”

  “Positive. Last Sunday I went on a boat ride. Up the Harb. That’s when I musta lost them. I don’t know what them damn glasses have been doing since, and I don’t care. You can’t tie me up with them after last Sunday. Damn right!”

  “Slow down, Samalson,” Hawes said.

  “Slow down, my ass! You drag me into a police station and—”

  “I said slow down!” Hawes said. Samalson looked at his face. Instantly, he shut up.

  “What boat were you on last Sunday?” Hawes asked, the menace still in his voice and on his face.

  “The SS Alexander,” Samalson said pettishly.

  “Where’d it go?”

  “Up the River Harb. To Paisley Mountain.”

  “When’d you lose the glasses?”

  “It must’ve been on the way back. I had them while we were at the picnic grounds.”

  “You think you lost them on the boat?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Did you go anywhere afterward?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “After the boat docked?”

  “Yeah. I was with a girl. The boat docks right near here, you know. On North Twenty-fifth. I had my car parked there. So we drove down to a bar near the supermarket. I stop there every now and then on my way home from work. That’s how come I was familiar with it. I didn’t feel like tracking all over the city looking for a nice place.”

  “What’s the name of the bar?”

  “The Pub.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s on North Thirteenth, Pete,” Carella said. “I know the place. It’s pretty nice for this neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, it’s a nice bar,” Samalson agreed. “I took the girl there, and then we drove around for a while.”

  “Did you park?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Near her house. In Riverhead.”

  “Could you have lost the glasses then?”

  “I suppose so. I think I lost them on the boat, though.”

  “Could you have lost them in this bar?”

  “Maybe. But I think it was the boat.”

  “Come here, Steve,” Byrnes said, and both men walked toward Byrnes’s office. In a whisper, Byrnes asked, “What do you think? Should we hold him?”

  “What for?”

  “Hell, he may be an accomplice in this thing. That lost-glasses story stinks to high heaven.”

  “It doesn’t read like a pair, Pete. I think our killer is a single.”

  “Still, the killer may know him. May head for this guy’s place after the murder. Put a tail on him. O’Brien’s sitting at his desk doing nothing. Use him.” Byrnes walked back to Samalson. Carella walked over to where Bob O’Brien was typing a report at the other end of the squadroom. He began talking to him in a whisper. O’Brien nodded.

  “You can go, Samalson,” Byrnes said. “Don’t try to leave the city. We may want to question you further.”

  “Would anyone mind telling me what the hell this is about?” Samalson said.

  “Yes, we would,” Byrnes said.

  “Boy, some goddamn police department in this city,” Samalson said, fuming. “Can I have my glasses back?”

  “We’re finished with them,” Byrnes said.

  “Thanks for nothing,” Samalson said, seizing the glasses. Hawes led him to the railing and watched as he went down the steps, still fuming. O’Brien left the squadroom a moment later.

  “Can I go, too?” Frankie asked.

  “Not yet, son,” Byrnes said. “We’re going to need you in a little while.”

  “What for?” Frankie asked.

  “We’re going to draw a picture,” Byrnes said. “Miscolo!” he yelled.

  From the clerical office outside the railing, Miscolo’s head appeared. “Yo?” he said.

  “You got any milk in there?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get this kid a glass, will you? And some cookies. You want some cookies, Frankie?”

  Frankie nodded. Byrnes tousled his hair and went back into the corner office.

  At 2:39 P.M. the police artist arrived.

  He did not look at all like an artist. He did not wear a smock or a floppy bow tie, and his fingers were not stained with paint. He wore rimless eyeglasses, and he looked like a bored salesman for an exterminating service.

  “You jokers send for an artist?” he asked at the railing, resting his leather case on the wood.

  Hawes looked up. “Yes,” he said. “Come on in.”

  The man pushed his way through the gate. “George Angelo,” he said, extending his hand. “No relation to Michel, either family-wise or talent-wise.” He grinned, exposing large white teeth. “Who do you want sketched?”

  “A ghost,” Hawes said. “This kid and I both saw him. We’ll give you the description, you make the picture. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Angelo said, nodding. “I hope you both saw the same ghost.”

  “We did,” Hawes said.

  “And can both describe him the same way. I sometimes get twelve eyewitnesses who each saw the same guy twelve different ways. You’d be surprised how cockeyed the average citizen is.” He shrugged. “But you’re a trained observer, and kids are innocent and unprejudiced, so who knows? Maybe this’ll be a good one.”

  “Where do you want to set up?” Hawes asked.

  “Anyplace you got light,” Angelo answered. “How about that desk near the window?”

  “Fine,” Hawes said. He turned to the boy. “Frankie, want to come over here?”

  They walked to the desk. Angelo opened his case. “This going into the newspapers?”

  “No.”

  “Television?”

  “No. We haven’t got time for that. We just want copies run off for the men trying to track down this guy.”

  “Okay,” Angelo said. He reached into the case for a sketch pad and pencil. Then he took out a stack of rectangular cards. He sat at the desk, looked up at the sunlight once, and then nodded.

  “Where do you want us to start?”

  “Pick the shape of the face from the shapes on this card,” Angelo said. “Square, oval, triangular, they’re all there. Look them over.”

  Hawes and Frankie studied the card. “Something like this, don’t you think?” Hawes asked the kid.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Frankie agreed.

  “The oval?” Angelo asked. “Okay, we’ll start with that.”

  Quickly, he sketched an egg-shaped outline on the pad. “How about noses? See anything here that looks like his nose?” He produced another card. Hawes and Frankie looked at the profusion of smellers that covered the card.

  “None of them look just like his nose,” Frankie said.

  “Any of them come close?”

  “Well, maybe this one. But not really.”

  “The idea in this is simplicity,” Angelo said to Hawes. “We’re not trying for a portrait that’ll hang in the Louvre. We want a likeness that people can identify. Shade and shadow tend to confuse. I try to stick to line, blacks and whites, a feeling of the person rather than a photographic representation. So if you’ll try to remember the characteristics that struck you most about this man, I’ll try to get them on paper—simply. We’ll refine as we go along. This is just the beginning; we’ll draw and we’ll draw until we get something that looks like him. Now, how about those noses? Which one is the closest to his?”

  “This, I guess,” the kid said. Hawes agreed.

  “Okay.” Angelo began sketching. He produced another card. “Eyes?”

  “He had blue eyes, I remember that,” Hawes said. “Sort of slanted, downward.”

  “Yeah,” the kid said. Angelo kept nodding and drawing.

  The first sketch looked like this:

  “That don’t look like him at all,” the kid said when Angelo showed it.

  “All right,” Angelo said mildly. “Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  “It just don’t look like the guy, that’s all.”

  “Well, where is it wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said, shrugging.

  “He’s too young, for one thing,” Hawes said. “The guy we saw is an older man. Late thirties, maybe early forties.”

  “Okay. Start with the top of the picture and work your way down. What’s wrong with it?”

  “He’s got too much hair,” the kid said.

  “Yes,” Hawes agreed. “Or maybe too much head.”

  Angelo began erasing. “That better?”

  “Yeah, but he was going bald a little,” the kid said, “like up here. On the forehead.”

  Angelo erased two sharp wings into the black hair on the man’s forehead. “What else?”

  “His eyebrows were thicker,” Hawes said.

  “What else?”

  “His nose was shorter,” the kid said.

  “Or maybe the space between his nose and his mouth was longer, either one,” Hawes said. “But what you’ve got doesn’t look right.”

  “Good, good,” Angelo said. “Go on.”

  “His eyes looked sleepier.”

  “More slanted?”

  “No. Heavier lids.”

  They watched as Angelo sketched. Putting an overlay of tracing paper onto the erased drawing, he began to move his pencil rapidly, nodding to himself as he worked, his tongue peeking from one corner of his mouth. At last he looked up.

  “This any better?” he asked.

  He showed them the second drawing:

  “It still don’t look like him,” Frankie said.

  “What’s wrong?” Angelo asked.

  “He’s still too young,” Hawes said.

  “Also, he looks like a devil. His hair is too sharp,” Frankie said.

  “The hairline, you mean?”

  “Yeah. It looks like he got horns. That’s wrong.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The nose is about the right length now,” Hawes said, “but it’s still not the right shape. He had more of a—this middle thing, whatever you call it, the thing between the nostrils.”

  “The tip of his nose? Longer?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are the eyes?” Angelo asked. “Better?”

  “The eyes look right,” Frankie said. “Don’t touch the eyes. Don’t them eyes look right?”

  “Yes,” Hawes said. “The mouth is wrong.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s too small. He had a wide mouth.”

  “And thin,” the kid said. “Thin lips.”

  “Is the cleft chin right?” Angelo asked.

  “Yeah, the chin looks okay. But that hair…” Angelo was beginning to fill in the hairline with his pencil. “That’s better, yeah, that’s better.”

  “A widow’s peak?” Angelo asked. “Like this?”

  “Not as pronounced,” Hawes said. “He had very close-cropped hair, receding above the temples, but not as pronounced as that. Yes, now you’re getting it, that’s closer.”

  “The mouth longer and thinner, right?” Angelo asked, and his pencil moved furiously. Working with a new sheet of tracing paper, he began to transpose results of the collaboration. It was very hot at the desk where he worked. His sweating fist stuck to the flimsy tracing paper.

  The third version of the suspect looked like this:

  There was a fourth version, and a fifth version, and a tenth version, and a twelfth version, and still Angelo worked at the desk in the sunlight. Hawes and the boy kept correcting him, often changing their minds after they had seen their verbal description take shape on paper. Angelo was a skilled technician who transposed their every word into simple line. Their reversals of opinion did not seem to disturb him. Patiently, he listened. And patiently, he corrected.

  “It’s getting worse,” the kid said. “It don’t look at all like him now. It looked better in the beginning.”

  “Change the nose,” Hawes said. “It had a hook in it. Right in the middle. As if it had been broken.”

  “More spaces between the nose and the mouth.”

  “Shaggier eyebrows. Heavier.”

  “Lines under the eyes.”

  “Lines coming from his nose.”

  “Older. Make him older.”

  “Make his mouth a little crooked.”

  “No, straighter.”

  “Better, better.”

  Angelo worked. There was sweat clinging to his forehead. They tried turning on the fan once, but it blew Angelo’s papers all over the floor. From time to time, cops from all over the precinct drifted over to where Angelo was working at the desk. They stopped behind him, looking over his shoulder.

  “That’s pretty good,” one of them said, never having seen the suspect in question.

  The floor was covered with sheets of rumpled tracing paper now. Still Hawes and Frankie fired their impressions of the man they had seen, and Angelo faithfully tried to capture those impressions on paper. And suddenly, after they had lost count of the number of drawings, Hawes said, “Hold it! That’s it.”

  “That’s him,” the kid said. “That’s the guy!”

  “Don’t change a line,” Hawes said. “You’ve got him! That’s the man.” The kid grinned from ear to ear and then shook hands with Hawes.

  Angelo sighed a heavy sigh of relief.

  This was the picture they felt resembled the man they had both seen:

  Angelo began packing his case.

  “That’s very neat,” the kid said.

  “That’s my signature,” Angelo replied. “Neat. Forget this Angelo stuff. My real name is Neat, with a capital N.” He grinned. He seemed very happy it was all over.

  “How soon can we get copies?” Hawes asked.

  “How soon do you need them?”

  Hawes looked at his watch. “It’s three-fifteen,” he said. “This guy is going to kill a woman at eight tonight.”

  Angelo nodded seriously, the cop in him momentarily replacing the artist. “Send a man with me,” he said. “I’ll run them off the minute I get back.”

  At 4:05 P.M., armed with pictures the ink on which was still wet, Carella and Hawes left the precinct simultaneously, Carella headed for a bar on North Thirteenth, a bar named The Pub, the bar to which Samalson had taken his girl on the preceding Sunday. Carella went there solely to show the picture to the bartender in the hope he might identify the suspect.

  Hawes went directly around the corner from the precinct to Seventh Street, where Frankie Annuci had said he had met the man who’d given him the letter. It was Hawes’s plan to start with Seventh and work his way east, heading uptown, going as far as Thirty-third if he had to. He would then double-back, working north and south. If the man lived anywhere in the neighborhood, Hawes meant to find him. In the meantime, a copy of the picture had been sent to the IB in the hope of getting a make from the photos in the files in case none of the investigating cops struck pay dirt.

  At 4:10 P.M. Meyer and Willis left the squadroom with their copies of the picture. Starting with Sixth Street, their plan was to work westward from the precinct, going down past First and into the named streets below First until they hit Lady Astor’s street.

  At 4:15 P.M. a squad car was called back to the precinct. Copies of the picture were dumped into the car and then distributed to every motorized and foot patrolman in the precinct. Copies were delivered to the neighboring 88th and 89th Precincts, too. The immediate area adjacent to the precinct, starting with Grover Avenue and going into Grover Park, was flooded with detectives from the 88th and the 89th (which precincts handled the actual park territory), in the event the suspect might return in search of his binoculars. It was a big city, and a big, teeming precinct—but the precinct was fortunately smaller than the city.

  Hawes, stopping at every store, stopping at every tenement, talking to shop owners and superintendents, talking to the kids in the streets, who were sometimes the shrewdest observers around, did not connect until he reached Twelfth Street.

  It was late afternoon by this time, but the streets had not cooled down at all. Hawes was still hot, and he was beginning to feel the first disgruntled disappointment of defeat. How the hell would they ever stop this guy? How the hell would they ever find him? Dispiritedly, he began working his way up the street, showing the picture. No, they did not know the man. No, they did not recognize him. Was he from the neighborhood?

  At the fifth tenement from the corner, he showed the picture to a landlady in a flowered cotton housedress.

  “No,” she said instantly. “I never—” And then she stopped. She took the picture from Hawes’s hands. “Yeah, that’s him,” she said. “That’s the way he looked this morning. I saw him when he was coming down. That’s the way he looked.”

  “Who?” Hawes said. He could feel the sudden surge of energy within him as he waited for her answer.

  “Smith,” she said. “John Smith. A weird duck. He had this—”

  “What apartment?” Hawes said.

  “22. That’s on the second floor. He moved in about two weeks ago. Had this—”

  But Hawes was already moving into the building, his gun drawn. He did not know that his conversation with the landlady had been viewed from a second-floor window. He did not know that his red hair had instantly identified him to his observer. He did not know until he was almost on the second-floor landing, and then he knew instantly.

  The explosion thundered in the small, narrow corridor. Hawes fell to the floor at once, almost losing his footing on the top step, almost hurtling backward down the stairwell. He fired a shot into the dimness, not seeing anything, but wanting John Smith to know he was armed.