“Yes,” he said. “That one.”
She nodded and began to draw, using quick and very certain strokes, pausing only to ask questions and show more pictures: What about his mouth? His ears? One of these shapes? And so on, until a real face began to take form on the page. Deborah kept quiet and let Nichole lead the two men through it. At each of her questions they would lean together and confer in soft Creole, and then the one who spoke English would answer while his cousin nodded. Altogether, between the two handcuffed men doing their muted Creole patter and the nearly magical emergence of a face on the page, it was a riveting performance, and I was sorry to see it end.
But end it did, at last. Nichole held up the notebook for the two men to study, and the one who spoke no English looked hard and then began to nod. “Oui,” he said.
“That is him,” the other said, and he gave Nichole a sudden very large smile. “Like magic.” He said majeek, but the meaning was clear.
Deborah had been leaning back in her chair and letting Nichole work. Now she stood and walked around the conference table, looking in over Nichole to look at the drawing. “Son of a bitch,” she said. She looked up at Hood, who was still lounging around by the door with a faintly sleazy smirk still on his face. “Get that file over there,” Debs said to him. “The one with the photos.”
Hood stepped over to the far end of the table, where a stack of folders teetered beside the telephone. He flipped through the top five or six while Deborah fidgeted. “Come on, goddamn it,” she said to him, and Hood nodded, held up one folder, and brought it over to her.
Deborah scattered a pile of photographs on the table, sorted through them quickly, and nudged one out and over to Nichole. “Not bad,” she said, as the artist picked up the photo and held it beside her sketch, and Nichole nodded.
“Yeah, not bad at all,” Nichole said. She looked up at Deborah with a happy smile. “Damn, I am good.” She flipped the photo back to Deborah, who grabbed it and held it up for the two Haitians to see.
“Is this the man who sold you the Porsche?” Deborah asked them.
The man with the swollen eye was already nodding and saying, “Oui.” His cousin made a great show of staring at the picture, leaning forward to study it carefully, before finally saying with complete authority, “Yes. Absolutely. That is him.”
Deborah looked at the two of them and said, “You are positive? Both of you?” And both of them nodded vigorously.
“Bon,” Debs said. “Très beaucoup bon.” The two Haitians smiled, and the one with the swollen eye said something in Creole.
Deborah looked at the cousin for a translation.
“He says, will you please speak English, so he can understand you,” the man said with an even bigger smile, and Vince and Hood both snickered.
But Deborah was far too happy with the picture to let a minor jab bother her. “It’s Bobby Acosta,” she said, and she looked at me. “We got the little bastard.”
TWENTY
THE UNIFORMED COP LED THE TWO PRISONERS AWAY TO A holding cell. Nichole gathered her things and left, and Deborah sat back down and stared at the picture of Bobby Acosta. Vince looked at me with a shrug and an expression of, Now what? and Deborah looked up at him. “Are you still here?” she said.
“No, I left ten minutes ago,” Vince said.
“Beat it,” Deborah said.
“I wouldn’t have to beat it if you’d just hold it for a minute,” Vince said.
“Go shit in your ear,” Debs said, and Vince walked out with one of his horrible artificial laughs trailing behind him. Deborah watched him go and, since I know her very well, I knew what was coming, so I was not surprised when it came. “All right,” she said to me when Vince had been gone for about thirty seconds. “Let’s go.”
“Oh,” I said, trying very hard to look like I had not expected this, “do you mean you’re not going to wait for your partner, as department policy and a specific order from Captain Matthews have suggested?”
“Just get your ass out the door,” she said.
“What about my ass?” Hood said.
“Go boil it,” Deborah said, snapping up out of her chair toward the door.
“What do I tell your partner?” Hood said.
“Tell him to check the salvia dealers,” she said. “Come on, Dex.”
It occurred to me that I spent far too much of my time obediently following my sister around. But it did not occur to me how I could avoid doing so again, so I followed.
In the car, Deborah drove us up onto the Dolphin Expressway and then north on 95. She did not volunteer any information, but it was not terribly hard to figure out where we were going, so just for the sake of small talk, I said, “Have you somehow figured out a way to find Bobby Acosta, just by staring at his picture?”
“Yeah,” she snapped, very grumpy again. Deborah had never been very good with sarcasm. “As a matter of fact, I have.”