It was a walk I hadn’t made in a year, that down to Number 808 Broadway, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way my body moved along the route. I remember reading in The Principles of Psychology-that doorstop of a book what Dr. Kreizler’s old teacher at Harvard, Professor William James, had written some years back, and which I’d fought my way through along with the rest of our team during the Beecham case-that the brain isn’t the only organ that stores memories. Some of the more primitive parts of the body-muscles, for instance-have their own ways of filing away experience and recalling it at a moment’s notice. If so, my legs were proving it that night, for I could’ve made the trip even if somebody’s cut my spinal cord below the cerebral cortex and left me running on nothing but my brain stem, like one of those poor laboratory frogs what Professor James and his students seemed to be always chopping into little pieces.

As we made our way along Gramercy Park and then down Irving Place, I once again kept a sharp eye out for any Gashouse boys what might be out to pick off drunken swells who were on their way home from the gaming houses of the Tenderloin. But there wasn’t any trouble hanging in the air, just the same moist, clean scent that’d followed the day’s rain, and as we moved south I began to loosen up. Miss Howard still didn’t want to divulge any more information concerning her case until we got to Number 808 and actually met the lady in question, so our efforts were applied with singleness of purpose to getting Mr.