CHAPTER Three

The best I was able to get on the phone was an appointment for 3 p.m., so at that hour Monday afternoon I entered the lobby of an apartment house in the upper Seventies between Madison and Park. It was the palace type, with rugs bought by the acre, but with the effect somewhat spoiled, as it so often is, by a rubber runner on the main traffic lane merely because the sidewalk was wet with rain. That's no way to run a palace. If a rug gets a damp dirty footprint, what the hell, toss it out and roll out another one, that's the palace spirit.

I told the distinguished-looking hallman that my name was Archie Goodwin and I was bound for Miss Eraser's apartment. He got a slip of paper from his pocket, consulted it, nodded, and inquired: “And? Anything else?” I stretched my neck to bring my mouth within a foot of his ear, and whispered to him: “Oatmeal.” He nodded again, signalled with his hand to the elevator man, who was standing outside the door of his car fifteen paces away, and said in a cultivated voice, “Ten B.” “Tell me,” I requested, “about this password gag, is it just since the murder trouble or has it always been so?” He gave me an icy look and turned his back. I told the back: “That cost you a nickel. I fully intended to give you a nickel.” With the elevator man I decided not to speak at all. He agreed. Out at the tenth floor, I found myself in a box no bigger than the elevator, another palace trick, with a door to the left marked 10A and one to the right marked 10B. The elevator man stayed there until I had pushed the button on the latter, and the door had opened and I had entered.