The taxi stopped. Lieutenant Valcour got out, paid the driver, and dismissed him.
Riverside Drive seemed about ten degrees colder than the midtown section of the city had been. Or was it fifteen or twenty degrees? A northerly wind blew iced blasts from the Hudson River and at him across the treetops of the terraced park. Marge Myles, Lieutenant Valcour decided as he took in the façade of the building that housed her apartment, did herself rather well.
A sleepy and irritable Negro casually asked him “Wha’ floor—’n’ who, suh?” as he entered the overheated lobby. The boy was smartly snapped into full consciousness by the view offered him of Lieutenant Valcour’s gold badge.
The proper floor proved to be the fourteenth.
As the hour was hovering about one in the morning, Lieutenant Valcour was considerably surprised at the promptness with which the door swung open in response to his ring, and considerably more surprised by the querulous voice that emerged from beneath a wig, dimly seen in the poor light of a foyer, and said, “Well, I must say you took your own time in coming. Put your coat and hat on that table there, and then come into the parlour.”
Lieutenant Valcour complied. He followed a dimmish mass of jet bugles into the more accurate light of a room heavily cluttered with gold-leafed furniture and brocades.
“I’m Madame Velasquez—Marge’s ma. I ain’t Spanish myself, but if there ever was a Spaniard, my late husband Alvarez was.”
The wig on Madame Velasquez’s head offered no anachronism to the bugles of her low-cut dress. Its reddish russet strands were pompadoured