“Like the dogs.”

She looked at me, and her eyes glinted behind the veil. “Why, yes,” she said. “Quite like the dogs.”

By seven-thirty Miss Henrietta was dozing lightly and the jogger had run away somewhere. More to the point, a woman with shoulder-length ash-blond hair and wearing a paisley print blouse and wheat-colored jeans had descended the stone steps in front of 17 Gramercy Park West, glanced at her watch, and headed around the corner on Twenty-first Street. Fifteen minutes had passed and she had not returned. Unless the building had held two women of that description, she was Crystal Sheldrake, the future ex-wife of Craig Sheldrake, the World’s Greatest Dentist. And if she was out of her apartment it was time for me to go into it.

I let myself out of the park. (You don’t need a key to do that, or even a piece of high-tempered German steel.) I crossed the street, attaché case in hand, and mounted the steps of Number Seventeen. It was four stories tall, an exemplary specimen of Greek Revival architecture thrown up early in the nineteenth century. Originally, I suppose, one family had sprawled over all four floors and stowed their luggage and old newspapers in the basement. But standards have crumbled, as I’m sure Miss Henrietta could have told me, and now each floor was a separate apartment. I studied the four bells in the vestibule, passed up the ones marked Yalman, Porlock, and Leffingwell (which, taken as a trio, sounds rather like a firm of architects specializing in industrial parks) and poked the one marked Sheldrake. Nothing happened. I rang again, and nothing happened again, and I let myself in.

With a key. “The bitch changed the lock,” Craig had told me, “but she couldn’t hardly change the one downstairs without getting the neighbors steamed at her.” Having the key saved me a couple of minutes, the lock being a rather decent one. I pocketed the key and walked to the elevator. It was in service though, the cage descending toward me, and I decided I didn’t much want to meet Yalman or Porlock-Leffingwell lived on the first floor, but I decided it might even be he in the elevator, returning to base after watering his rooftop garden.