It was twenty minutes to seven. Some two dozen city employees-medical examiner, photographer, fingerprinters, meat-basket bearers, the whole kaboodle-had finished the on-the-scene routine, including private interviews with the eyewitnesses. I had made the highest score, having had sessions with Stebbins, a precinct man, and Inspector Cramer, who had departed around five o’clock to organize the hunt for Santa Claus.

“I’m not objecting,” Kiernan told Stebbins, “to going to the District Attorney’s office. I’m not objecting to anything. But we’ve told you all we can, I know I have. It seems to me your job is to find him.”

“Do you mean to say,” Mrs. Jerome demanded, “that no one knows anything at all about him?”

“So they say,” Purley told her. “No one even knew there was going to be a Santa Claus, so they say. He was brought to this room by Bottweill, about a quarter to three, from his office. The idea is that Bottweill himself had arranged for him, and he came up in the private elevator and put on the costume in Bottweill’s office. You may as well know there is some corroboration of that. We have found out where the costume came from-Burleson’s on Forty-sixth Street. Bottweill phoned them yesterday afternoon and ordered it sent here, marked personal. Miss Quon admits receiving the package and taking it to Bottweill in his office.”

For a cop, you never just state a fact, or report it or declare it or say it. You admit it.

“We are also,” Purley admitted, “covering agencies which might have supplied a man to act Santa Claus, but that’s a big order. If Bottweill got a man through an agency there’s no telling what he got. If it was a man with a record, when he saw trouble coming he beat it.