Blood Relatives (5 page)

“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.

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.

Patrolman Shanahan, who had discovered Muriel Stark’s body, had not turned in a lamp outage report after his tour of duty that Saturday night, but perhaps he’d been too busy reporting the homicide. Patrolman Feeny, on the other hand, had walked that same beat on Friday night’s graveyard shift. And when he’d reported back to the station house at 8:00 Saturday morning, he had handed a lamp outage report to the desk sergeant, and on it he had indicated that the precinct was the 87th, the precinct post was post number 3, and the date was September 6. He had located the lamppost at the corner of Harding and Fourteenth, and had identified it as lamppost number 6—there were six lampposts on the block, three on each side of the street. He had not indicated when the lamp went out, presumably because he hadn’t known. Nor had he written in a time for when the lamp had been restored to service. He had put check marks alongside the words Broken Globe and also Broken Bulb. There were no comments under ACTION TAKEN. He had signed the bottom of the form with his rank, his name, and his shield number. The report told Carella that the light had been out on Friday night, and he knew from his visit to the scene that the light was out
now
as well. What he did
not
know was whether it had been repaired sometime after the Friday outage, and then broken again after the Saturday night murder.

He immediately called the electric company.

The man who answered the phone said, “Yes, that outage was reported.”

“When was it repaired?” Carella asked.

“Look, you know how many damn outages we get in this city every night of the week?” the man asked.

“I only want to know about this particular outage,” Carella said. “Lamppost number six, on the corner of Fourteenth and Harding. According to what we’ve got here, our patrolman
reported a broken bulb and globe on the morning of Saturday, September sixth, and presumably the desk sergeant—”

“Yes, it was reported to us. I already told you it was reported.”

“Was it repaired?”

“I would have to check that.”

“Please check it,” Carella said. “I’m specifically interested in knowing whether it had been repaired by eleven o’clock that Saturday night.”

“Just a second.”

Carella waited.

When the man came back onto the line, he said, “Yes, that lamp was repaired at four fifty-seven P.M. on Saturday, September sixth.”

“It’s out again now,” Carella said.

“Well, so what? If you didn’t happen to know it, that lamp happens to be right outside an abandoned building that’s being torn down. You’re lucky we repaired the damn thing at all.”

“I’d like it repaired again,” Carella said. “We’re investigating a homicide here, and it’s important for us to know whether that streetlamp could have illuminated—”

“Well, shit, put your
own
emergency service on it.”

“No, I want it fixed the way the electric company would have fixed it. Your lightbulb, your globe.”

“Who’s this I’m talking to?”

“Detective Carella.”

“
Paisan,
have a heart, huh? I’m up to my
ass
in orders here. I’ll be lucky if I get through them by the Fourth of—”

“I need that lamp fixed,” Carella said. He looked up at the wall clock. “It’s a quarter past seven,” he said. “My partner and I are going out for a bite, we’ll be back at the scene there by eight, eight-thirty. I want it fixed by then.”

“You sure you’re Italian?” the man from the electric company said, and hung up.

Carella buzzed the desk sergeant, asked for Patrolman Shanahan’s home number, and immediately dialed it. Shanahan barked “Hello!” into the phone, and then immediately apologized when Carella identified himself. He said his sixteen-year-old daughter kept getting phone calls day and night from her girl-friends or from these pimply-faced jerks who kept coming to the house, man couldn’t get a moment’s peace, phone going like sixty all the time.

“So I’m sorry for snapping your head off,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Carella said. “There was just one thing I wanted to ask you. On Saturday night, when you found that girl’s body—”

“Damn shame,” Shanahan said.

“…would you remember whether the streetlamp was working?”

“Sure, it was working.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I just know it was working. I automatically look for outages, know what I mean? I see a busted lamp, I fill out a report. But aside from that, I could see the girl’s hand. Up on the top step there, know what I mean? Now if the lamp had been out, it would’ve been blacker’n a witch’s asshole on that corner. Couldn’t have seen the hand, know what I mean? But I could see it. Laying palm up, right there outside the doorway. Didn’t put my flashlight on till after I’d climbed the steps. Threw my beam inside the doorway then and saw the body.”

“Did you see anything inside the hallway
before
you turned on your flash?”

“I could see the outline of the body, yes. I knew there was a body inside there, yes.”

“Okay, thanks a lot,” Carella said.

“Don’t mention it,” Shanahan said.

At a quarter past 8:00 that Monday night, Carella and Kling went back to Harding Avenue. The streetlamp was burning again. It cast a circle of light onto the sidewalk and into the gutter. The circle of light included the entire front stoop of the building in which Muriel Stark had been murdered. The detectives went into the hallway. The only light was the bounce from the lamp outside, but on the floor they could clearly make out the chalked outline of Muriel Stark’s body, and on the walls they could see scribbled graffiti and spatters they assumed were bloodstains. Standing against the wall opposite Kling, Carella could even distinguish the color of his eyes. There was no question but that the reflected light in that hallway was sufficient for identification. They
had
to believe that Patricia Lowery had indeed seen a dark-haired, blue-eyed man stabbing her cousin to death. This being the case, they further had to believe that she’d mistakenly identified Walt Lefferts only because he resembled the killer more closely than any of the other men in the lineup. They realized with dismay that Patricia’s value to them had been totally destroyed by this false identification. They were looking for a dark-haired, blue-eyed man who looked like Walt Lefferts, yes, but even if they found him, and even if Patricia pointed an accusing finger at him, how could they know for certain that he was the man she’d
really
seen committing the murder? She had
also
seen Walt Lefferts committing the murder, hadn’t she?

As far as they were concerned, they were still looking for someone Patricia had described—accurately, it now seemed—as “a perfect stranger.”