Eight of the thirty-seven black armed robbers named Sonny were men who'd been born during the two years that Sonny Liston was the world's heavyweight boxing champion and considered a worthy role model. They were now all in their late twenties, and Wade and Bent were looking for a black Sonny who'd been described as being in his twenties. They knew that to most white men all black men looked alike. That was the difficulty in getting a white man to identify a black man from a photograph - especially a police photograph, which did not exactly qualify as a studio portrait. Dominick Assanti was no different from any other white man they'd ever known. To Dominick, only two black men were instantly recognizable: Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby. All other black men, including Morgan Freeman and Danny Glover, looked alike. To Assanti, Bent and Wade probably looked alike, too.
First they showed him each of the eight mug shots one by one.
"Recognize any of them?" they asked.
Assanti did not recognize any of the men in the mug shots.
He commented once that he would not like to meet this guy in a dark alley.
Wade and Bent agreed.
Then they placed the mug shots on the table side by side, all eight of them, and asked him to pick out the three Sonnys who most resembled the Sonny who'd run past him with a gun in his fist on the night of the Carella murder.
Assanti said none of them looked like the man he'd seen.
"Are you sure?" Bent asked.
"I'm positive," Assanti said. "The one I seen had a scar on his face."
"Ah," Bent said.
So it was back to the computer again, this time with new information. Recognizing the difficulty of judging a man's age when he's rushing by you at night with a gun in his hand, the gun taking on more immediacy than the year of his birth, they dropped the age qualification. Recognizing, too, that the bakery shop holdup did not necessarily indicate a history of armed robbery, they dropped this qualification as well and ran a citywide search for any black man convicted of a felony within the past five years, provided he was named Sonny and had a scar on his face. They turned up sixty-four of them. This was not surprising.
It was almost impossible to grow up black in the inner city without one day acquiring a scar of one sort or another. And because keloids - scars that extend and spread beyond the original wound - were more prevalent in black skin than in white, these scars were usually highly visible. The knife scar over Wade's left eye was a keloid. He'd been told it could be treated with radiation therapy combined with surgery and injection of steroids into the lesion. He'd opted to wear the scar for the rest of his life. Actually, it didn't hurt in his line of work.
They now had sixty-four new mug shots to show Assanti. He pondered the photos long and hard. He was really trying to be cooperative, but he was severely limited in that he was white. In the long run, he simply gave up.
Bent and Wade hit the streets again.
Eileen was already there when Kling got to the office at five-ten that Wednesday afternoon. He apologized for being late and then took the chair Karin Lefkowitz offered him. He found it difficult to keep his eyes off Eileen. She was dressed casually - well, almost sloppily, in a faded denim skirt and a cotton sweater that matched her eyes - but she looked fresh and beautiful and radiantly happy. Karin explained that they'd just been talking about Eileen's first success with the hostage negotiating team. Last night, she'd . . .
"Well, it wasn't a major triumph or anything like that," Eileen said quickly.
"A baptism of fire, more or less," Karin said, and smiled.
"Bad word to use," Eileen said. "Fire."
Both of them were smiling now. Kling felt suddenly like an outsider. He didn't know how Eileen was using the word, and he felt somewhat like a foreigner here in his own country. Fire meant combustion. Fire meant to terminate someone's employment. Fire also meant to shoot. But Karin seemed to know exactly which meaning or meanings Eileen had intended, and this sense of shared intimacy was somehow unsettling to him.
"So," Karin said, "I'm glad you could make it."
But what had happened last night? Weren't they going to tell him?
"Happy to be here," he said, and smiled.
"I'll tell you where we are," Karin said. "Then maybe you can help us."
"Happy to," he said, and realized he'd repeated himself, or almost, and suddenly felt foolish. "If I can," he said lamely. Help them with what? he wondered.
Karin told him where they were.
Recounted the whole confusing tale of the Halloween night that had only been last year but that seemed centuries ago, when he'd stuck his nose into what was admittedly none of his business, causing Eileen to lose her two backups and placing her in an extremely dangerous and vulnerable position with a serial killer.
"Since that time," Karin explained, "Eileen has been blaming you for…"
"Well, you know," Kling started, "I was only trying to . . ."
"I know that," Eileen said.
