Blood Relatives (87th Precinct) Read online

  “Why’s that, Mr. Donatelli?”

  “Well,” Donatelli said, and shrugged.

  “How old is this girl?” Carella asked.

  “Well,” Donatelli said.

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s pretty young,” Donatelli said.

  “How young?”

  “She’s thirteen.”

  Carella turned away, walked toward the far end of the narrow room, and then came back to where Donatelli was sitting.

  “Were you with her Saturday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Her house.”

  “Where were her parents?”

  “They went to a movie.”

  “What time did you go up there?”

  “At about ten.”

  “And what time did you leave her?”

  “At a quarter to twelve.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Donatelli said. “If I give you her name, and you ask her about me, she’ll say she doesn’t know me. She knows I can get in trouble for being with her, she knows that. She’ll lie.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “What’s her goddamn name?”

  “Gloria Hanley.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “831 North Sheridan.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “I met her six months ago.”

  “How old was she then?”

  “Well, I…I suppose she was twelve.”

  “You’re a very nice man, Mr. Donatelli,” Carella said.

  “I love her,” Donatelli said.

  The object of Mr. Donatelli’s affections was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when she opened the door to the apartment on North Sheridan. Gloria Hanley was a tall, angular girl with tiny breasts, boyish hips, green eyes, a dusting of freckles on her cheeks, and sun-washed blonde hair cut in a Dutch Boy bob. They had announced themselves as police officers, and she had asked them to hold up their shields to the peephole before she would open the door. She stood in the open doorway now in jeans and short-sleeved blouse, studying them with only mild interest.

  “I was just having lunch,” she said. “What is it?”

  “We’d like to ask you some questions,” Carella said. “Would it be all right if we came in?”

  “This isn’t about that dope thing, is it?” Gloria said.

  “What dope thing?”

  “At school. Some kids were caught smoking dope in the toilet.”

  “No, this isn’t about that.”

  “Well, sure, come on in,” Gloria said. “I hope you won’t mind my eating while we talk. I go to school at the crack of dawn, you see, the bus picks me up at six-thirty, would you believe it? But I get home early, too, so I guess it’s not all that horrible. The thing is I’m positively starved when I get here. Would you care for something to eat?”

  “Thank you, no,” Carella said.

  They followed her into the kitchen. Gloria poured herself a glass of milk and drank half of it before she sat down at the table. “My mother should be home any minute,” she said, “if this is anything she ought to hear. She works part-time, usually gets home a little after I do. What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “Gloria, I wonder if you can tell us where you were last Saturday night between ten and midnight.”

  “Huh?” Gloria said.

  “Last Saturday night,” Carella said. “That would have been Saturday, the sixth.”

  “Gee, I don’t know where I was,” Gloria said.

  “Would you have been here?”

  “Home, you mean?”

  “Yes. Here in the apartment.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Gloria said.

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “My parents, I guess.”

  “Your parents were here with you?”

  “Or maybe not. Saturday night, huh? No, wait a minute, they went out, that’s right.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “A movie, I think. I’m not sure. Yeah, a movie. Mm-huh. You sure you don’t want something to eat?”

  “Were you here alone?” Kling asked.

  “I guess so. If my parents were out, then I guess I was here alone.”

  “Any of your friends stop by to see you?” Carella asked.

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Well, this was only Saturday night,” Carella said. “It shouldn’t really be too difficult to remember whether—”

  “No, I’m pretty sure nobody stopped by,” Gloria said.

  “So you were here alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Watched television, I guess.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gloria, do you know a man named James Donatelli?”

  “No, I don’t believe so,” Gloria said, and poured more milk from the container into her glass.

  “He says he knows you.”

  “Really? James who did you say?”

  “Donatelli.”

  “No,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t know him. He must be mistaken.”

  “He says he was here Saturday night.”

  “Here? You’re kidding. I was here alone.”

  “Then he wasn’t here, is that right?”

  “I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”

  “James Donatelli.”

  “Nobody by that name was here Saturday night. Or any other night, for that matter.”

  “He said you might lie for him.”

  “Why should I lie for somebody I don’t even know?”

  “So he won’t go back to prison.”

  “I don’t know anybody who’s been in prison. You’re making a mistake. Officers, really, I mean it. I don’t know this man, whoever he is.”

  “Gloria, a girl was killed on Saturday night—”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but—”

  “Please hear me out. This man Donatelli has a prison record, we picked him up this morning because we wanted to question him about the murder.”

  “I don’t know him, I’m sorry.”

  “He says he was here Saturday night. That’s his alibi, Gloria. He was here at the time the girl was killed.”

  “Well, that’s…Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes. And he also said you’d deny it.”

  “Well, he was right, I am denying it. He wasn’t here.”

  “That means he hasn’t got an alibi.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but how can I say he was here if he wasn’t here?”

  “Gloria, we’re going to have to assume that Donatelli was lying to us. Which means we’re going to keep questioning him about where he really was on Saturday night. And if we still can’t get some satisfactory answers, we’ll run a lineup on him and try to get a positive identification from the girl who witnessed the murder.”

  “Well, if he didn’t do it, he’s got nothing to worry about,” Gloria said.

  “Before we put him through all that, I want to ask you again—are you sure you don’t know anyone named James Donatelli?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “No one by that name was here on Saturday night.”

  “No one. I was here alone. I was here alone watching television.”

  “Gloria,” Carella said, “if you know this man, please say so.”

  “I do not know him,” she said.

  At 2:00 that afternoon they ran a lineup in the squadroom. Six detectives and James Donatelli stood in a row. The detectives all had dark hair and light eyes, and they were all wearing dark suits and shirts without ties. None of them wore hats. James Donatelli was the third man in the line, flanked by two detectives on his left, and four detectives on his right. In addition to the seven men in the lineup, there were three other men in the room: Carella, Kling, and a man named Israel Mandelbaum who had been a
ppointed as Donatelli’s 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 you out 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 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 wer
e 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.