Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

when I took the contact sheets back up to the office, turned on the light, moved it low over the sheets and took out the loupe. There was that homeless man standing on the comer, perhaps not the focus of Leon’s picture, just a part of it, a part of the scene. A homeless man would fit in at the park. He’d blend in. He’d be invisible. Unless he sat behind the chess players, signaling he had something for sale.
    The park was full of homeless men, men most people went out of their way not to notice. But what could any of them have to do with Ms. Peach?
    I picked up the contact sheets again, holding the loupe over each picture, the ones taken outside Bechman’s office, the ones at the dog run, hoping something would jump out at me, an insight, an answer, something that would tell me who Peach passed the prescriptions to.
    But then I put the sheets down. What was I thinking? No way would Bechman have agreed to have the prescriptions sold in the park, to have his name right there in black and white in case of an arrest. In order to sell the drugs in the park, or anywhere else for that matter, someone would have to actually fill the prescriptions first. Someone would have had to take them to a drugstore, probably a different one each time, to pay for them, to sign for them.
    Someone dressed well could have done that, filled a prescription for a child. Easy, since under no circumstances would the kid be doing it herself. And anyone could sign for the drugs, scribble a name down, any name. Even if the druggist asked for ID, not a problem in today’s world. All you needed was a computer and a few minutes.
    Not a homeless man.
    Perhaps someone dressed like a homeless man. Someone pretending to be a homeless man. Someone pretending to be some kid’s father, poor kid’s croaking with pain, a kid who needs Oxycontin, Percocet, Tylenol with codeine, God knows what else. Someone dressed well enough to meet the doctor, unless he only met Ms. Peach, my mind spinning now, seeing how this could work, trying one way, then another.
    I went back to the contact sheets again, sitting now, the lamp low over the thumbnail pictures, not looking at Dashiell, looking behind him, remembering the homeless men hanging over the fence, reaching out to the dogs. One brought a bag of biscuits once and came into the run, met by four of us when he opened the bag, told him that no food was allowed in the run because some dogs found the presence of food and competing predators inflammatory. But that wasn’t all. No one who loved a dog enough to sit in the dog run every day so that the dog could get a little R & R beyond his walk was going to bet his dog’s life on food from a stranger, especially a stranger who looked like a bum or worse, especially not in New York City, where paranoia was the norm.
    I started from the top again, the man standing on the corner, the view beyond him toward Sixth Avenue. There was something familiar about him. Was it just that I’d looked at his picture so many times, or was it something else, something more important, something that was visible beyond the outfit?
    And then I saw it. It was something about his posture, his stance. I took the grease pencil and marked the other shots where there were people in the background, this time looking only at the way they stood, the position of the head, the articulation of the limbs, something nagging at me, about the way they looked. And that’s when I remembered another picture I’d seen, another man who seemed to have more flexibility than the rest of us, more grace, too. Or should I say not another man, the same man?
    I turned on the computer and Googled his name. I was sure it would be there, even if it was only part of a cast list, hoping for more, scrolling down past the Web sites for the movies he’d been in, the cast list of a play, then finding one that had actors’ bios and clicking on that, and there it was.
    There was a list of the films he’d been in. It turns out I’d seen more than a few of them without ever registering his name or his face. And the list of Broadway shows, his agent’s name and contact number, a couple of pictures, pictures where his posture was more familiar than the face because his face had been altered, disguised, to put him in character. And then I hit the jackpot, the personal information, the dance school where he’d trained, the fact that his mother had had a short career as a dancer and then taught dance when he was growing