The producer pulled the downstairs door open and walked up a staircase that was concave in the middle of each step from years of wear. Halfway up the stairs the producer heard a cheerful voice holler from above, “Is that who I think it is?”

The cripple had peered over the second-floor banister, smiling and waving the producer up.

The producer reached the top of the stairs, turned left, and trailed behind the old cripple, who was limping toward the rear of the hallway. As he walked, the producer could smell cooking, disinfectant, urine, and body odor in the hallway, none of it to his liking.

The old cripple’s apartment door was open. The producer followed the cripple into the stale, stinking room. Except for patches of peeling paint, there was nothing on the room’s walls. A cotlike bed oddly positioned in the center of the room had a dirty, lumpy quilt lying across it.

God only knows what’s hidden under that quilt, thought the producer.

Two small pillows with gray cases were pushed up against the metal headboard, one in front of the other. On top of the bed a book was open and turned over. From where the book was broken it appeared to be about half read. The book was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Some newspapers were piled up on the floor.

There wasn’t a rug, just a small rectangular knitted mat with rows of tassels on both ends that was placed on one side of the bed. The mat looked Mexican. A little table leaned against one wall. On the table was a big wind-up alarm clock and a clean triangular glass ashtray that had DOMINIC’S RESTAURANT in large green letters on its three sides. In a cheap frame was a picture of the cripple and a woman holding each other around the waist. The cripple appeared to be in his forties. He was standing without a crutch. He looked robust and in good health. The producer noted that the woman was much younger than the cripple and very pretty. Also on the table was a set of keys hooked onto a rabbit’s foot key chain. It lay next to a drinking glass used to hold pencils. A dark brown bureau with six drawers and a matching mirror on top leaned crookedly against the other wall. The mirror had a small crack in the upper right-hand corner.

Seven years’ bad luck, thought the horrified producer to himself.

The cripple wasn’t wearing the heavy woolen overcoat and seedy stained fedora he had on when the producer first saw him on Madison Avenue, and the producer noticed that he appeared much older and thinner now. He could almost pass for starving. His large head and broad shoulders seemed oddly misplaced on such an emaciated frame. He had a high forehead due to a receding hairline. What hair the cripple did have was gray. His face was gaunt with deep, sunken cheeks.