Hopper was lying there dead, the torn leg of his pajamas rippling in the bitter March night wind. There wasn’t anyone else around at that hour except the night porter, the policeman he’d called, and who had called his precinct house in turn, and a taxi driver or two. Maxon, the midnight-to-morning clerk (Dennison went off at 11:30), had to remain at his post for obvious reasons. They were just standing there waiting for the morgue ambulance; there wasn’t anything they could do.

Bob, the night porter, was saying: “I thought it was a pillow someone drop out the window. I come up the basement way, see a thick white thing lying there, flappin’ in th’ wind. I go over, fix to kick it with my foot—” He broke off. “Golly, man!”

One of the drivers said, “I seen him comin’ down.” No one disputed the point, but he insisted, “No kidding, I seen him coming down! I was just cruisin’ past, one block over, and I look this way, and I see—whisht, ungh—like a pancake!”

The other cab driver, who hadn’t seen him coming down, said: “I seen you head down this way, so I thought you spotted a fare, and I chased after you.”

They got into a wrangle above the distorted form. “Yeah, you’re always chiselin’ in on my hails. Follyn’ me around. Can’t ye get none o’ your own?”

Striker crossed the street, teeth chattering, and turned and looked up the face of the building. Half the French window of 913 was open, and the 100m was lit up. All the rest of the line was dark, from the top floor down.

He crossed back to where the little group stood shivering and stamping their feet miserably. “He sure picked a night for it!” winced the cop. The cab driver opened his mouth a couple of seconds ahead of saying something, which was his speed, and the cop turned on him irritably. “Yeah, we know! You seen him coming down. Go home, will ya!”

Striker went in, rode up, and used his passkey on 913. The light was on, as he had ascertained from the street. He stood there in the doorway and looked around. Each of the 13’s, in the St. Anselm, was a small room with private bath. There was an opening on each of the four sides of these rooms: the tall, narrow, old-fashioned room-door leading in from the hall; in the wall to the left of that, the door to the bath, of identical proportions; in the wall to the right of the hall door, a door giving into the clothes closet, again of similar measurements. These three panels were in the style of the nineties, not your squat modern aperture. Directly opposite the room door was a pair of French windows looking out onto the street. Each of them matched the door measurements. Dark blue roller-shades covered the glass on the inside.