I said, “Brace yourself, Whitewell.”
We heard the sound of quick steps in the corridor, then a girl stood in the doorway.
“Come in,” Kleinsmidt said. “Look at the persons in this room and tell me whether any of them is the person you saw last night.”
She stepped across the threshold. There was something proudly defiant about her, as though she knew that every hand would be turned against her, and had schooled herself to a pretended indifference. She didn’t give the impression of having been aroused at an early hour to face this ordeal. Somehow, looking at her, you felt she hadn’t been to bed and that she wasn’t accustomed to going to sleep before daylight. There was a little too much color on her face, and her mouth was hard. But she’d taken care of herself, watched her figure, cared for her hands, was particular about her clothes — a woman in the late twenties who had learned never to let her guard down for a moment.
You knew what she was going to say before she said it. Her eyes moved in a swift half circle of appraisal, and then stopped on Whitewell. But before she could say anything, Bertha Cool was leaning forward on the edge of her chair. “No, you don’t,” she said to Kleinsmidt. “You’re not going to pull any frame-ups here. If there’s going to be an identification, you put the man in line with some other man of approximately the same age and build and—”
“Who’s running this?” Kleinsmidt demanded indignantly.
“You may be running it, but I’m telling you how you’ll have to do it if it’s going to count.”
“It’ll count with me. How about it? Is that person here?”
She raised a finger and pointed it at Whitewell.
Kleinsmidt said, “That’s all. Wait outside.”