Blood Relatives by Ed McBain

attorney, and who still objected to the lineup, even though Donatelli had agreed to it.
    “You’ll get a person in here,” Mandelbaum said, “she won’t remember what the hell she saw Saturday night, she’ll pick youout of the lineup, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail. You want to go to jail for the rest of your life?”
    “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.

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 thisman 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