looker.'
'Talk to her?' asked Littlemore.
'She didn't talk much — not to me, anyway.'
'Anything special you remember about her?'
'I opened the door for her some mornings,' said Clifford.
'What's special about that?'
'I'm off at six. The only girls you see at that hour are working girls, and Miss Riverford didn't look like a working girl, if you know what I mean. She would have been going out at, I don't know, maybe five, five- thirty?'
'Where was she going?' asked Littlemore.
'Beats me.'
'What about last night? Did you notice anybody or anything unusual?'
'What do you mean unusual?' asked Clifford.
'Anything different, anybody you had never seen before.'
'There was this one fella,' said Clifford. 'Left about midnight. In a big hurry. Did you see that fella, Mac? Didn't look right, if you ask me.'
The doorman addressed as Mac shook his head.
'Smoke?' said Littlemore to Clifford, who accepted the cigarette, pocketing it since he wasn't permitted to indulge on duty. 'Why didn't he look right?'
'Just didn't. Foreigner, maybe.' Clifford was unable to articulate his suspicion with any greater specificity, but he asserted positively that the man did not live in the building. Littlemore took a description: black hair, tall, lean, well dressed, high forehead, mid- to late thirties, wearing glasses, carrying a black case of some kind. The man climbed into a hackney cab outside the Balmoral, heading downtown. Littlemore questioned the doormen for another ten minutes — none remembered Clifford's black-haired man entering the building, but he might well have gone up unremarked with a resident — and then asked where he could find the Balmoral's chambermaids. They pointed him downstairs.
In the basement, Littlemore came to a hot low-ceilinged room with pipes running along its walls and a clutch of maids folding linen. All knew who Miss Riverford's girl was: Betty Longobardi. In whispers, they confided to the detective that he wouldn't find Betty anywhere in the building. She was gone. Betty had left early without saying good-bye to anyone. They didn't know why. Betty was a handful but such a nice girl. She didn't take any lip, not even from the wing manager, the women told Littlemore. Maybe she'd had another fight with him. One of the maids knew where Betty lived. With this information secured, Littlemore turned to go. It was then that he noticed the Chinaman.
Clad in a white undershirt and dark shorts, the man had come into the room carrying a wicker basket overflowing with freshly cleaned sheets. Having deposited the contents of this basket onto a table filled with like items, he was walking out again when he attracted the detective's attention. Littlemore stared at the retreating man's thick calves and sandals. These were not in themselves particularly interesting; nor was his gait, which involved the sliding of one foot after the other. The result, however, was arresting. Two wet stripes were left on the floor in the man's wake, and these stripes were flecked with a glistening dark-red clay.
'Hey — you there!' cried Littlemore.
The man froze, his back to the detective, shoulders hunched. But the next moment he started off again at a run, disappearing around a corner, still carrying his basket. The detective sprang after him, turning the corner just in time to see the man pushing through a pair of swinging doors at the end of a long corridor. Littlemore ran down the corridor, passed through the doors — and gazed out at the Balmoral's cavernous and noisy laundry, where men were laboring at ironing boards, washboards, steam presses, and hand-cranked washing machines. There were Negroes and whites, Italians and Irish, faces of all kinds — but no Chinamen. An empty wicker basket lay on its side next to an ironing board, rocking gently as if recently set down. The floor was thoroughly wet, disguising any tracks. Littlemore pushed up the brim of his boater and shook his head.
Gramercy Park, at the foot of Lexington Avenue, was Manhattan's sole private park. Only the owners of the houses opposite the park's delicate wrought-iron fence had the right to enter. Each house came with a key to the park gates, offering access to the small paradise of flower and greenery within.
To the girl emerging from one of those houses early Monday evening, August 30, that key had always been a magical object, gold and black, delicate yet unbreakable. When she was a little girl, old Mrs Biggs, their servant, used to let her carry the key in her tiny white purse on their way across the street. She was too small to turn the key by herself, but Mrs Biggs would guide her hand and help her do it. When the iron gate released, it was as if the world itself were opening up before her.
The park had grown much smaller as she grew up. Now, at seventeen, she could of course turn the key without assistance — and did so this evening, letting herself in and walking slowly to her bench, the one she always sat on. She was carrying an armload of textbooks and her secret copy of The House of Mirth. She still loved her bench, even though the park had somehow become, as she got older, more an attachment to her parents' house than a refuge from it. Her mother and father were away. They had repaired to the country five weeks earlier, leaving the girl behind with Mrs Biggs and her husband. She had been delighted to see them go.
The day was still oppressively hot, but her bench lay in the cool shade of a willow and chestnut canopy. The books sat unopened beside her. The day after tomorrow, it would be September, a month she had been looking forward to for what seemed an eternity. Next weekend, she would turn eighteen. Three weeks after that, she would matriculate at Barnard College. She was one of those girls who, despite a fervent wish to be living another life, had staved off womanhood as long as she could, through the ages of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, clinging to her stuffed animals even while school friends were already discussing stockings, lipstick, and invitations. At sixteen, the stuffed animals had finally been relegated to the upper reaches of a closet. At seventeen, she was lithe, blue-eyed, and heart-stoppingly beautiful. She wore her long blond hair tied with a ribbon in the back.
When the bells of Calvary Church struck six, she saw Mr and Mrs Biggs hurrying down the front stoop, rushing off to the shops before they closed. They waved to the girl, and she to them. A few minutes later, brushing tears from her eyes, she set off slowly toward home, clutching her textbooks to her chest, looking at the grass and the clover and the hovering bees. Had she turned to her left, she might have seen, on the far side of the park, a man watching her from outside the wrought-iron fence.
This man had been watching her a long time. He carried a black case in his right hand and was dressed in black — overdressed, in fact, given the heat. He never took his eyes from the girl as she crossed the street and climbed the stairs to her townhouse, a handsome limestone affair with two miniature stone lions mounting an ineffectual guard on either side of the front door. He saw the girl open the door without having to unlock it.
The man had observed the two old servants leaving the house. Glancing left, right, and over his shoulder, he started off. Quickly he approached the house, ascended the steps, tried the door, and found it still unlocked.
A half hour later, the summer-evening silence of Gramercy Park was ruptured by a scream, a girl's scream. It carried from one end of the street to the other, hanging in the air, persisting longer than one would have thought physically possible. Shortly thereafter, the man burst out the back door of the girl's house. A metal object no larger than a small coin flew from his hands as he stumbled down the rear steps. It hit a slate flagstone and bounced surprisingly high into the air. The man nearly fell to the ground himself, but he recovered, fled past the garden potting shed, and escaped from the garden down the back alley.
Mr and Mrs Biggs heard the scream. They were just returning, laden with bags of groceries and flowers. Horrified, they trundled into the house and up the stairs as quickly as they were able. On the second floor, the master bedroom door was open, which it should not have been. Inside that room, they found her. The shopping bags fell from Mr Biggs's hands. A pound of flour spread out around his old black shoes, raising a little cloud of white dust, and a yellow onion rolled all the way to the girl's bare feet.
She stood in the center of her parents' bedroom, clad only in a slip and other undergarments not meant for servants' eyes. Her legs were naked. Her long slender arms were outstretched above her head, the wrists bound by a thick rope, which was secured in turn to a ceiling fixture from which a small chandelier depended. The girl's fingers nearly touched its crystal prisms. Her slip was torn, both front and back, as if rent by the lashes of a whip or cane. A man's long white tie or scarf was wound tightly around her neck and between her lips.
She was not, however, dead. Her eyes were wild, staring, unseeing. She looked on the familiar old servants not with relief but with a kind of terror, as if they might be murderers or demons. Her whole frame shivered, despite
