Free The Last Dance by Ed McBain

Houston?” Byrnes asked.
    â€œWell, I don’t know.”
    â€œWhat
do
you know about him?”
    â€œNot much. Not yet.”
    â€œFind out. And soon.”
    â€œDid he leave a will?” Hawes asked.
    â€œLeft everything he had to the kids.”
    â€œWhich was what?”
    â€œBupkes,”
Meyer said.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Parker asked.
    â€œRabbit shit.”
    â€œSo then what’s this
something
somebody wanted bad enough to kill for?”
    â€œThe MacGuffin,” Hawes said.
    â€œI told you,” Willis said. “It’s a fuckin movie.”
    â€œMovie, my ass,” Byrnes said. “Get some composites made from the witnesses in that pizza joint. Let’s at least find two guys who came in blazing in broad daylight, can we? And find out where that poker game took place. There has to be …”
    â€œOn Lewiston,” Carella said. “Up in the …”
    â€œ
Where
on Lewiston? Our man’s leaving
town
tomorrow.”
    The room went silent.
    â€œI want you to treat this like a single case with Danny as the connecting link,” Byrnes said. “One of the guys in that poker game
knew
Danny, and another one may have killed Hale. Let’s find out who was
in
the damn game. And find out who that old man really
was
. He didn’t exist in a vacuum. Nobody does. If he had something somebody wanted, find out what the hell it was. If it was just the insurance policy, then stay with the Keatings till you nail them. I want the four of you who caught the squeals to work this as a team. Split the legwork however you like. But
bring
me something.”
    Carella nodded.
    â€œMeyer?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œArtie? Bert?”
    â€œWe hear you.”
    â€œThen do it,” Byrnes said.
    â€œWhat about my dope bust?” Parker asked.
    â€œStay,” Byrnes said, as if he were talking to a pit bull.
    There were several training exercises at the academy, each designed to illustrate the unreliability of eye witnesses. Each of them involved a variation on the same theme. During a class lecture, someone would come into the room, interrupting the class, and then go out again. The cops-in-training would later be asked to describe the person who’d entered and departed. In one exercise, the intruder was merely someone who went to one of the windows, opened it, and walked out again. In another, it was a woman who came in with a mop and a pail, quickly mopped a small patch of floor, and went out again just as quickly. In a more vivid exercise, a man came in firing a pistol, and then rushed out at once. In none of these exercises was the intruder accurately described afterward.
    Brown, Kling, and the police artist interviewed fourteen peoplethat Tuesday morning. Only one of them—Steve Carella—was a trained observer, but even he had difficulty describing the two shooters who’d marched into the pizzeria at ten minutes past nine the day before. Of all the witnesses who’d been there at the time, only two blacks and four whites remembered anything at all about the men. The white witnesses found it hard to say what the black shooter had looked like. If they’d been asked to tell the difference between Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Tyson, there’d have been no problem. Maybe. But when the police artist asked them to choose from representative eyes, noses, mouths, cheeks, chins, and foreheads, all at once all black men looked alike. Then again, they might have had similar difficulty describing an Asian suspect.
    In the long run—like many other decisions in America—the result was premised on race. The blacks had better luck describing the black suspect, and the whites had better luck with the white one. The detectives were less than satisfied with what the artist finally delivered. They felt the composite sketches were … well … sketchy at best.
    When Carella and Meyer