Broken Prey

door.
    “I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to a policeman . . .” She was a small woman with narrow shoulders, wrapped in a polyester housecoat printed to resemble a quilt, with peacocks and cockatoos on the quilt squares. She had short curly hair, like a poodle’s, but silvery white, and looked at Lucas through cat’s-eye glasses that might have been briefly fashionable in the fifties. A television rambled in the background, a shopping channel selling used Rolexes.
    But she’d seen a man by the telephone. “I do remember that; yes. A man in a white shirt. That phone is not used very much.”
    “Do you remember what he looked like?” Lucas asked. He edged inside the door; she apparently had three rooms, a living room overlooking the street, a bedroom, and a small kitchen. Lucas couldn’t see a bath, but he could see a half-open door in the bedroom, and thought that might be it. The place smelled of Glade deodorizer.
    She frowned, was uncertain. “Well, I don’t know . . . He was only there for a minute or two.”
    “Would you mind if I looked out the window?”
    “Please do,” she said. He crossed her living room in three steps, looked out the window. The phone was directly across the street and only fifteen feet from a streetlight.
    “Did you see more than one man last night?” Lucas asked.
    “No, not last night,” she said.
    “Did you see a car?”
    Again she frowned. “Yes, I did. He got out of a car, he parked just over there . . .” She pointed a bony finger just up the street from the phone. “A white Oldsmobile.”
    “An Oldsmobile.”
    “I think so.”
    “New? Or old.”
    “New, I think.”
    “You say, you’ve said, you think. You’ve said it several times . . .”
    “I was watching television. That’s all I do now, watch television and look out the windows, except on Mondays and Wednesdays when the social lady comes and takes me to the store. But I wasn’t paying too much attention to the telephone . . .”
    “Okay . . . If we showed you some photographs, could you see if you recognize the man? Or the car?”
    She smiled; she had improbably small, white, pearly teeth. “I could certainly try, but I’m pretty old.”
    “Mrs. Bird, I’ll be back in a minute, okay?” Lucas said. “Just give me a minute or two.”
    “I’m not going anyplace. I hope.”
     
    WHEN LUCAS GOT back to the street, Sloan was just coming out of the bookstore, wiping his nose with a Kleenex: “They said you were upstairs.”
    “The woman upstairs said she saw a guy . . . I need your photo spread,” Lucas said.
    “What else did she see?”
    “She said he’s driving a white Oldsmobile. A new one,” Lucas said.
    Sloan’s eyebrows went up. “That could be something.”
    Sloan got his briefcase from the car and together they went back up the stairs. As they walked up the stairs, Lucas said, “Try not to get too close to her. You give her that cold, you could kill her.”
    “Goddamnit.” Sloan was offended.
    “No, no—I’m not kidding.”
     
    MRS. BIRD OPENED THE DOOR for them. She was more animated now than when Lucas had first knocked; excited.
    “We need a place for you to sit and look at these and see them all at once,” Sloan told her.
    They all looked around. In the kitchen, a single wooden chair faced a small oval table the size of a pizza pan, and on the table, a paper rose poked out of a glass bud vase. Lucas and Sloan wouldn’t fit at the table.
    “Could I move your end table around in front of the couch, maybe?” Lucas asked.
    “Of course.”
    Mrs. Bird sat in the middle of the three-cushion couch. Lucas took some old Reader’s Digest s off the table and moved it in front of the couch. Lucas and Sloan sat on either side of Bird, and Sloan spread out ten five-by-seven color photographs. One of the men was Charlie Pope. The other nine, all of whom met the general description of Charlie Pope, were cops.
    She looked at them for a moment, then said to Sloan, “I saw this on television once.”
    “It’s pretty important . . .”
    She looked back at the pictures, and then reached out and touched Charlie Pope’s face. “This is the man, I believe.”
     
    THEY SAT LOOKING at the pictures for a few seconds, then Sloan said to Lucas, “We need to make out an affidavit and bring it back here.” Unspoken: the old lady might die in the next fifteen minutes.
    “We’ll get somebody with Rochester to do it, and we can bring it back here after the