“I won’t go to jail,” Donatelli said. “I’m innocent. I was with Gloria at the time of the murder. I’m not the man, I’m not the guilty party.”
Mandelbaum shook his head gravely, and said, “If I had a nickel for every poor slob who was ever mistakenly identified in a lineup, I’d be a rich man and not a practicing lawyer.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Donatelli said, but Mandelbaum was still shaking his head when Patricia Lowery walked into the squadroom.
Both of her hands were bandaged, and there was a bandage on her left cheek as well, where eight stitches had been taken to close the knife wound there. Carella led her to a chair and then asked if she’d care for a cup of coffee or anything. She declined the coffee. She was already looking over the men lined up in front of the detention cage. She knew why she was there; Carella had prepared her on the telephone.
“Patricia,” he said now, “there are seven men standing across the room there. Would you please go over to them, and look at them closely, and then tell me whether you recognize any one of them.”
Patricia got out of the chair and walked slowly across the room, past the filing cabinets and over to where the seven men were standing just in front of the detention cage. She paused before each man, looking at him carefully before she moved on to the next man in line. When she reached the end of the line, she turned to Carella and said, “Yes, I recognize one of these men.”
“Where did you see this man before?” Carella asked.
“He murdered my cousin last Saturday night,” Patricia said. “And he cut me on the hands and on the face.”
“Would you please indicate who this man is by walking to him and placing your hand on his shoulder?”
Patricia turned and walked toward the line of men again.
Her hand reached out.
The man whose shoulder she touched was a detective who’d been on the force for seventeen years, and who’d been transferred to the 87th Squad only the month before. His name was Walt Lefferts.
4
The detectives weren’t too terribly surprised. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised. Even Walt Lefferts, who’d been mistakenly identified as the killer, wasn’t surprised. They were all experienced cops and familiar with the unreliability of witnesses. At the Police Academy, in fact, they had all sat through a variation of what was known as the “Window Washer Bit.” During a lecture unrelated to identification or witnesses or testimony, a man would unobtrusively come into the room, cross quietly behind the instructor and then go to the window, where he would busy himself working on a latch there. The man had brown hair. He was wearing brown trousers, a blue jacket, and brown shoes. He was carrying nothing but a screwdriver. He would work on the window for five minutes, and then cross quietly behind the instructor again and let himself out of the room. The moment he was gone, the instructor would interrupt his lecture and ask the students to describe this man who had just been in the room for five minutes. Specifically, he wanted to know:
(1) The color of the man’s hair.
(2) The color of his trousers.
(3) The color of his jacket.
(4) The color of his shoes.
(5) What he was carrying, if anything.
(6) What he did while in the room.
Well, the color of the man’s hair was variously described by the students as black, brown, blond, red, and bald. (Some said he was wearing a hat.) Thirty percent of the students correctly identified the color of the trousers as brown, but an equal percentage said they were blue. The remainder of the students opted for beige or gray. As for the man’s blue jacket, it was described in descending order of preference as brown, green, gray, blue, tan, and yellow. The brown shoes were described by most of the students as black. When it came to what the man was carrying, an astonishing 62 percent of the students said a bucket of water. Presumably, this was because a similar percentage reported that he had washed the windows while in the room. Only 4 percent of the students reported accurately that he had been carrying a screwdriver and that he had worked on a window latch while in the room. One student said he was carrying a stepladder. It was probably this same student who said the man had changed a lightbulb while in the room. And another student (but he’d undoubtedly been asleep during the lecture) said he had not seen anyone entering the room at all!
So Patricia Lowery’s unreliability wasn’t totally unexpected. In fact, that’s why they’d run a lineup in the first place. They could have done it another way. They could have put Donatelli in the Interrogation Room, facing the one-way mirror. Then they could have brought Patricia into the room next door and asked her to look through the glass. Then they could have said, “Is that the man who killed your cousin?” But they knew too many rape and/or assault victims were ready to identify anyone as their attacker, a response generated more by confusion and fear than by vindictiveness or outrage. The lineup was safer.
When they told Patricia Lowery that Walt Lefferts was a detective 2nd/grade, she would not believe them. She insisted that he was the man who’d killed her cousin. She had been standing not three feet away from the murderer, she had watched him wielding the knife, she had seen him approaching her after he’d finished with Muriel, she certainly knew what he looked like, she would never in her life forget what he looked like. They explained again that Walt Lefferts was a detective, and that he’d been home in bed with his wife of thirteen summers on the night of the murder. Patricia said it was amazing. He looked so much like the man, it was positively amazing. They thanked her for coming up to the squadroom, and then they sent her home in a radio motor patrol car.
There was something that had to be established before they could continue with the investigation. Until now they had been working on the supposition that Patricia Lowery could identify the man who had slain her cousin. Her false identification of Walt Lefferts opened up a whole new can of buttered beans. The question they now asked was: Had she actually seen the man? It was one thing to have seen him and then to have become confused about what he looked like. It was quite another not to have seen him at all. She had told them he was “a perfect stranger,” but if she hadn’t really seen him, how the hell could she know what he was?
As soon as it was dark, they went back to the tenement on Harding and Fourteenth. In their first conversation with Patricia Lowery, they had asked, “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” and she had replied, “Yes. There wasn’t any light in the hallway, but there was light from the streetlamp.” There was indeed a streetlamp outside the building on Harding Avenue, but its globe and its lightbulb had been shattered, and the area of sidewalk directly in front of the building was in darkness. They climbed the steps and entered the building. The hallway was so black, they had trouble seeing each other, even standing side by side. They waited, reasoning that their eyes would grow accustomed to the dark, but the blackness was so total that even after standing there for ten minutes, Carella could barely discern Kling’s features. There had been no moon on the night of the murder; by Patricia’s own report, it had been raining heavily. If the streetlamp outside had been inoperative, Patricia couldn’t possibly have seen anyone clearly enough to have identified him. If, on the other hand, the streetlamp had been burning...
In this city, patrolmen were required to report lamp outages observed during the night. The printed form called for the location of the lamp, the lamppost number, the time the lamp went out (if known), the time the lamp was relighted, and whether it was the globe, the bulb, or the mantle that had been broken — the patrolman was to indicate this by putting a check mark in the appropriate space. At the bottom of the form, the words ACTION TAKEN were printed, and there were three blank lines beneath those words. The patrolman was supposed to indicate on those lines whether he had taken any special action short of climbing the pole and replacing the lightbulb himself. Normally — unless the lamppost was just outside a bank or a jewelry store or some other establishment that was a prime target for a nighttime burglary — the patrolman took no action other than to turn in the outage report at the completion of his tour. The desk sergeant then notified the electric company, which got around to repairing the lamp in its own sweet time — the very next day, or three days later, or in some sections of the city, two or three weeks later.