Small Town

It turned out there was a wholesaler on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn who sold barber supplies, including straight razors. He identified the razor as one made in Solingen, Germany, by a firm that had gone out of business (or at least stopped producing razors) some twenty years ago. That didn’t make the razor an antique, just an old razor, and, since straight razors didn’t change much from one decade to the next, it was possible that there were still retailers who had similar razors in stock. It was also very possible that some local barbers, who kept their razors for a lifetime, had razors like this one.

The wholesaler’s own retail accounts included two not far from the perpetrator’s field of operations. Both were drugstores, and both carried a wide line of homeopathic remedies and old-fashioned devices. One was on Third Avenue at Nineteenth Street, the other on Sixth Avenue in the Village, between Eighth and Ninth Streets.

Neither had sold a straight razor to anyone within the past month.

Someone thought of thrift shops. There were quite a few in the immediate area, and two police officers worked their way down the list, finding quite a few that had a straight razor or two for sale, but none that had actually sold one. Then, in the Salvation Army store on Eighth Avenue, a woman with mean little eyes in an otherwise grandmotherly face said that no one had bought a straight razor from her, but one man had stolen one.

“If I’d seen him,” she said, “I might have stopped him on his way out and suggested he pay for it. Or perhaps not. After all, he was armed, wasn’t he? Though I can’t say he looked terribly dangerous.”

If she’d seen him? If she hadn’t seen him, how did she know he’d taken the razor? How did she know whether or not he looked dangerous?

“The security camera. We have two of them and they’re running all the time while we’re open. At the end of the day I review the tapes. Most of the time there’s nothing to look at, you can fast-forward through vast stretches of nothingness, but I’ll slow it down when I see anybody behaving furtively. Or quite boldly — they’re bold as brass, some of them.”

It was useful to review the tape in order to keep shoplifters from returning. When an offender turned up after he’d been caught on tape, he was simply turned away at the door, which was safer all around than trying to stop a suspected thief on his way out. No one could sue you for false arrest that way. And the value of the goods stolen was pretty much beside the point; they were all donated, after all, and the few items of real value got snatched up early on by dealers.

And did she by any chance still have the tape of the man pocketing the straight razor?

She did. They had thirty tapes for the two cameras, and rotated them, so that each day’s taping erased what had been recorded two weeks previously. She had to scan several tapes to find the right one, but she was able to go through them at great speed because she knew precisely what she was looking for. When she got there she slowed the tape to normal speed, and the two cops watched over her shoulder as an aging white man wearing a plaid shirt and dark pants picked a razor off a shelf, flicked it open, closed it, flicked it open a second time, rubbed it with his thumb to test it for sharpness, closed it again, looked around casually, and just as casually slipped it in his pocket.

They gave her a receipt for the tape and took it to a technician who tinkered with it electronically to sharpen the focus and increase the definition, then printed out copies. You couldn’t see the face very well, the camera was placed high and to the side, but it was something to work with.

The Sikh at the Getty station looked at one of the prints and said that it looked like the man to whom he’d sold the two gallons of gas. The witnesses who remembered a man who ordered a drink and left without touching it said it was hard to tell, but it was certainly possible that this was the man they’d seen. A man in the burn unit at St. Vincent, who’d gotten a glimpse of the man when he’d been about to launch the second Molotov cocktail at Harrigan’s, said he couldn’t tell; when he pictured the face, it morphed into the features of Satan, horns and all. Maybe it was him, maybe not. He couldn’t tell.