"The Rolex," he said. "Yeah. Yeah, I remember him. How could I forget him? I lost nine thousand dollars and I've got a record now. You know what it does, a pawnbroker with a record? I got to tell the license board every year. Every year I sit there and explain."
"Mr. Ocampo, can you describe him? The man who sold you the watch? The one who said it was stolen?"
"They were the same guy," Ocampo said. "That's what I told the cop. Nobody listened. He sold it to me in February, with a beard, with a Baltimore Orioles hat, with a Pennsylvania license, okay, Kevin something. Six weeks later the police come, it's stolen, they got a complainant named Dunleavy, they got an appraisal, they got a picture. And I go to court the first time, and he's not there, the complainant, they don't need him there. But I saw him once. Once. I'm standing outside the Southeast District, I'm smoking because I'm so upset, and he comes out the front door with my Rolex in a plastic bag and no beard. And I know him. I know him by the way he walks. He walks with his left foot turned out, like a duck. Like a duck, I'm telling you."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"I told my lawyer. My lawyer said, Rosario, take the probation, you don't want to tell a judge, 'I recognized his walk.' So I took the probation."
Nadia closed her eyes against the marble.
"Mr. Ocampo," she said, "how would you feel about driving up to the Northern District station this afternoon?"
There was a pause.
"What time?" said Rosario Ocampo.
* * *
At eleven-forty that morning a man named Desmond Pryor, who had worked in the Maryland Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library for twenty-six years and who did not believe in Saturdays, Sundays, or the Dewey Decimal System, walked into Szabo & Son with a manila envelope under his arm and the look of a man who has found a hundred-dollar bill in a coat he hadn't worn since spring.
Marco was behind him, carrying three coffees. Bernice came across the street without being asked, because she had been watching the door all morning.
Desmond laid the envelope on the counter and opened it, and slid out a photocopy, a big one, two pages wide, the type crisp and black from the microfilm reader, the photographs gray and grainy but perfectly clear.
THE BALTIMORE SUN — Saturday, February 9, 1980
NEIGHBORHOODS