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“The way they was standing, looking around. Nervous, you know? And the… I dunno. I just didn’t like the look of them.”
“Okay. So then what happened?”
“Then they split up. The one stayed in front, and the short fat guy came toward the back, toward here. That was funny.”
“You had finished mopping the spill by then?” Harris asked.
“Yeah. Right. So I pushed the bucket back into the kitchen. And then I looked through the window and saw…”
“The window in the right door, the In door?” Harris asked, pointing.
“Yeah,” Amal al Zaid said. “And I saw him take off his shade-”
“His glasses?” Harris interrupted. “Double-A Zee, I don’t remember you saying anything before about him wearing glasses.”
“Not glasses, his shade.”
When he saw the lack of understanding on Harris’s face, Amal al Zaid explained patiently, almost tolerantly: “You know, like a baseball cap, without a top.”
“Oh,” Harris said, understanding.
“The shade part was in the back,” Amal al Zaid went on. He pointed at his neck. “I guess it got in his way.”
“How was that?” Washington asked, softly.
“The wall,” Amal al Zaid said. “He was sitting where you are. That cushion is against the wall.” He pointed. “I guess when he sat down, his shade bumped into the wall. Anyway, he took it off.”
“Okay,” Harris said. “I’m a little dense. Then what happened?”
“Tony, would you hand me Mickey’s pictures?” Washington asked.
“Any particular one?”
“Better let me have all of them.”
“I thought,” Amal al Zaid said, “the last time, you told me he took only one picture of these guys.”
“There was only one image, Double-A Zee,” Washington explained. “But they made a number of different prints, trying to see if they could come up with something useful. You know, they blew up different parts of the picture.”
“Oh, yeah,” Amal al Zaid said.
"I tried that myself,” O’Hara said, “and got nowhere.”
“What are you looking for, Jason?” Harris asked.
“I want to see if this fellow left the scene wearing his shade,” Washington said. “Maybe Mickey’s pictures will at least show that.”
Tony Harris rummaged through the salesman’s case and came out with a manila envelope stuffed with prints. There were, in all, about twenty prints of the one digital image Mickey O’Hara had made as he walked up to the Roy Rogers restaurant. Most were eight by ten inches, and most of them concentrated on the heads and shoulders of the doers, although the process had failed to overcome the bad quality and bring out more details than in the original print.
Washington began to examine each print carefully. After looking at perhaps ten of them, he set one aside.
“You got something?” Mickey asked.
Washington didn’t reply.
After a moment, Mickey took the pictures Washington was finished with and started looking at them. As he finished the first one, he slid it across the table to Amal al Zaid, who loo
ked at it and slid it to Harris. When Washington finished, he had set two more prints aside. He slid the rest to Mickey, then patiently waited until they were all through, before handing Mickey the three prints he had set aside.
