The warm breath went tickling into my ear, but I was too stunned to react. Was this the breakthrough I needed?
'By whom?' I asked.
'I could have saved him,' she said.
I stared.
For answer to my unspoken question she solemnly raised the health and diet magazine and pointed to it.
She meant Stonehouse was sick of commercial-food processing, like everyone else.
In the living room Glynis and her mother were as I left them. Mrs Stonehouse was licking the rim of a filled glass.
'Nothing,' I said, sighing. 'It's very frustrating. Well
. . I'll keep trying. The only member of the family I haven't spoken to, Mrs Stonehouse, is your son. He was here the night his father disappeared. Perhaps he can recall something…'
They gave me his address and unlisted phone number.
Then I asked to see any family photos they might have, and presently I was sitting nervously on the couch between the two women, and we went through the stack of photos slowly. It was an odd experience. I felt sure I was looking at pictures of a dead man. Yale Stonehouse was, or had been, a thin-faced, sour man, with sucked-in cheeks and lips like edges of cardboard. The eyes accused and the nose was a knife. In the full-length photos, he appeared to be a skeleton in tweed, all sharp angles and gangling. He was tall, with stooped shoulders, carrying his head thrust forward aggressively.
'Height?' I asked.
'Six feet one,' Mrs Stonehouse said.
'A little shorter than that, Mother,' Glynis said quietly.
'Not quite six feet.'
'Colour of hair?'
'Brownish,' Ula said.
'Mostly grey,' Glynis said.
We finally selected a glossy 8 x 10 publicity photo. I thanked Ula and Glynis Stonehouse and assured them I'd keep them informed of the progress of my investigation.
Downstairs, I asked the man behind the desk if he had been on duty the night Yale Stonehouse had walked out the apartment house, never to be seen again. He said No, that would be Bert Lord, who was on duty from 4.00 p.m. to midnight. Bert usually shows up around 3.30 to change into his uniform in the basement, and if I came back in fifteen or twenty minutes, I'd probably be able to talk to him.
So I walked around the neighbourhood for a while, trying to determine Professor Stonehouse's possible routes after he left his apartment house.
There was an IND subway station on Central Park West and 72nd Street. He could have gone uptown or downtown.
He could have taken a crosstown bus in 72nd Street that would have carried him down to 57th Street, across to Madison Avenue, then uptown to East 72nd Street.
He could have walked over to Columbus Avenue and taken a downtown bus.
He could have taken an uptown bus on Amsterdam.
A Broadway bus would have taken him to 42nd Street and eastward.
A Fifth Avenue bus, boarded at Broadway and 72nd Street, would have taken him downtown via Fifth to Greenwich Village.
The Seventh Avenue IRT could have carried him to the Bronx or Brooklyn.
Or a car could have been waiting to take him anywhere.
When I returned to the apartment house precisely seventeen minutes later, there was a different uniformed attendant behind the desk.
'Mr Lord?' I asked.
'That's me,' he said.
I explained who I was and that I was investigating the disappearance of Professor Stonehouse on behalf of the family's attorneys.
'I already told the cops,' he said. 'Everything I know.'
'I realize that,' I said. 'He left the building about 8.45 on the night of January 10th — right?'
'That's right,' he said.
'Wearing hat, overcoat, scarf?'
'Yup.'
'Didn't say anything to you?'
'Not a word.'
'But that wasn't unusual,' I said. 'Was it? I mean, he wasn't exactly what you'd call a sociable man, was he?'
'You can say that again.'
I didn't. I said, 'Mr Lord, do you remember what the weather was like that night?'
He looked at me. He had big, blue, innocent eyes.
'I can't recall,' he said. 'It was a month ago.'
I took a five-dollar bill from my wallet, slid it across the marble-topped desk. A chapped paw appeared and flicked it away.
'Now I remember,' Mr Bert Lord said. 'A bitch of a night. Cold. A freezing rain turning to sleet. I remember thinking he was some kind of an idiot to go out on a night like that.'
'Cold,' I repeated. 'A freezing rain. But he didn't ask you to call a cab?'
'Him?' he said. He laughed scornfully. 'No way. He was afraid I'd expect two bits for turning on the light over the canopy.'
'So he just walked out?'
'Yup.'
'You didn't see which way he headed?'
'Nope. I couldn't care less.'
'Thank you, Mr Lord.'
'My pleasure.'
I went directly home, arrived a little after 5.00 p.m., changed into chino slacks and an old sports jacket, and headed out to eat. And there was Captain Bramwell Shank in his wheelchair in the hallway, facing the staircase. He whirled his chair expertly when he heard my door open.
'What the hell?' he said. 'I been waiting for you to come home, and you been inside all the time!'
'I got home early,' I explained. 'Not so long ago.'
'I been waiting,' he repeated.
'Captain,' I said, 'I'm hungry and I'm going out for something to eat. Can I knock on your door when I come back? In an hour or so?'
'After seven,' he said. 'There's a rerun of Ironsides I've got to watch. After seven o'clock is okay. Nothing good on till nine.'
Woody's on West 23rd was owned and managed by Louella Nitch, a widowed lady whose late husband had left her the restaurant and not much else. She was childless, and I think she sometimes thought of her clientele as her family. Most of the customers were from the neighbourhood and knew each other. It was almost a club. Everyone called her Nitchy.
When I arrived on the blowy Monday night, there were only a dozen drinkers in the front room and six diners in back. But the place was warm, the little lamps on the tables gleamed redly, the juke box was playing an old and rare Bing Crosby record ('Just a Gigolo'), and the place seemed a welcoming haven to me.
Louella Nitch was about forty and the skinniest woman I had ever seen. She was olive-skinned and she wore her hair cut short, hugging her scalp like a black helmet.
Her makeup was liberally applied, with dark eyeshadow and precisely painted lips. She wore hoop earrings, Victorian rings, necklaces of baroque medallions and amulets.
