The lawyer corrected meticulously, “Any of these men before. After all, you should be fair—”
Esther Clarde shifted her expressionless eyes over my face, looked at the lawyer, pointed her finger at him, and said, “You mean this guy? Is he the one?”
The district attorney’s man took my shoulder and pushed me forward. “No, this guy. Is he the one who was in the hotel the night of the murder?”
I looked at Esther Clarde and didn’t move a muscle in my face. She looked at me, frowned a minute, and said, “Say, he does look something like the same guy.”
She squinted her eyes and looked me over, then she slowly shook her head. “Say,” she said to the officer, “don’t let anybody kid you. There’s a resemblance, all right.”
“Well, are you certain it isn’t the same one?”
“Listen,” she said, “I’ve never seen this guy in my life before, but, no fooling, he looks like the man who was in there. If you want to get a good description, you can take this man to work on. That fellow was just exactly the same height, and almost the same weight. He was a little bit broader-shouldered than this guy. His eyes weren’t quite the same color, and there’s a difference about his mouth, and the shape of the ears is a lot different. I notice people’s ears. It’s a hobby of mine. This man that was in the hotel, I remember now, didn’t have any lobes on his ears at all.”
“That’s a valuable point,” the officer said. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”
“Never thought of it,” she said, “until I got to looking this man over. Say,” she asked me, “what’s your name?”
“Lam,” I said. “Donald Lam.”