I wasn’t specifically keeping an eye out for Bernice Rogers. But a pickpocket dick’s duties include observing good-looking women, and making sure they aren’t crooked, as some good-looking women are known on occasion to be; I collared many a beautiful moll whizzer in my time.

Anyway, as I sat peering over my racing form at her as she approached, my gaze fixed upon that harshly pretty mug of hers, I unobtrusively slipped out Schoemaker’s circular from my topcoat pocket to compare the brunette on paper to the blonde in the flesh.

But I barely had the sheet out of my pocket when she walked briskly by, seamed silk stockings flashing. Apparently she had no luggage, other than that precious parcel in swaddling.

So there I sat, as the blonde barreled by, charging through the doors into the train station like she was a quarterback carrying the ball. That woke the kid up, finally, and it began to howl; well, it was alive, anyway.

I hopped down, leaving my racing form on the chair, and nodded to Cletus, who nodded back, as he slapped the shoe leather of some real customer; and I strolled, counterfeit casual, out into the big square airy waiting room.

And she was gone.

The stairs down to street level were directly in front of me; had she taken them? Was she already stepping into a cab at the curb? I looked beyond the stairwell, to the sprawling central newsstand, slow-scanning the half-filled waiting-room pews at left and right. No sign of her. The room was filled with filtered light, from a huge circular window so high it reached up and caught some sky above the el tracks that fronted the station; people bustled through the gauzy midday unreality, ghosts hurrying through the dust-mote-speckled streaks of sun, but none of those people was the blonde.

And then I heard the echoing howl of a kid and there she was: heading with her bundle back to the women’s restroom.

I weaved through passengers coming and going, found my way to one of the wooden pews facing where she’d gone in, and settled myself down.