Page 95 of The Mystery of the Moving Image
“Not yet, it hasn’t,” I answered. I put my phone on the crowded tabletop. “I took a picture of one of the stills that had Muttonchops—the murderer.”
“Are you going to utilize the mugshots?”
“Bingo.”
Calvin took a sip of coffee. “There are only about 200 mugshots in the book.”
“The New York rogue’s gallery had a lot more, yeah?” I glanced up.
Calvin made a so-so motion with his hand. “Byrnesclaimedhe had documented over seven thousand criminals.”
“Well, if I had access tothatregistry, that’d be one thing. But it no longer exists, and I’m not sure how else to obtain a story about Muttonchops,” I said. “So much of what Dickson did has been lost. Finding the names of the even lesser-known assistants is all but an impossible task. Especially if they killed a man.”
“But a book of century-old mugshots?”
“It can’t hurt to look,” I said in return. “I know the timelines don’t exactly add up, but there’s always a chance that he committed less-violent crimes before he had it in himself to kill. If that were the case, maybe he ended up in here,” I continued, tapping the tablet.
“You think Thomas Edison would have hired a committed criminal?” Calvin picked up my phone and opened the photos.
“It was considerably easier to become a new person back then.”
“That’s true, I suppose.”
I was scrolling through photographs of forgers, pickpockets, and bank robbers, and paused at a woman known as the Confidence Queen. “Geez… this lady robbed a man of his life savings whileinprison.”
“Big Bertha,” Calvin murmured.
“Yeah—hold on, have you read this entire book? It’s, like, four hundred pages.”
“Cop,” he reminded me absently, pointing at himself, still scrolling on my phone.
“It should be the last picture. What’re you looking for?”
Calvin turned the phone around. “When’d you take this?”
It was at his old studio, of him and Dillon asleep on the bed together.
“When you were sleeping.”
“No shit.”
I laughed and shrugged a shoulder. “Stop being cute and I’ll stop taking photographic evidence.”
Calvin gave me a mixed expression—part questioning, part amusement. He pulled up the photo of Muttonchops and set it on the tabletop between us. “This is him?”
“Yeah. He’s memorable-looking. Might help,” I said before returning to the mugshots.
Calvin got out of his chair and moved around the table. He leaned over my shoulder and studied the photos with me. “He’s going to be at least ten years younger—I’d suspect midtwenties—if he’s in this collection. And keep in mind, he might have put on the weight and grown the facial hair after the fact.”
“I know.”
“Look at some of these aliases… Aleck the Milkman, Big Dick, Three-Fingered Jack….” Calvin pointed at one photo. “Ah. This man rented an apartment fewer than ten blocks from here and made counterfeit silver coins on the third floor.”
“They don’t make criminals like they used… look at this guy!” I quickly enlarged the page for easier reading. “John McCormack. Alias, Kid John. Burglar, sneak, second-story man.”
Calvin reached over me, picked up the phone, and held it up against the tablet to compare photos.
“What do you think?” I asked, looking up at him.
