"Is this the place?" George whispered, in startled revulsion.
"This is the place. And a good one for Price's purpose as you'll see when you get in."
The young man noted the battered doorway, slightly out of plumb, then stepped back and glanced at the façade. Many of the windows, uncurtained and open, were lit up. Those of the top floor—dormers projecting from a mansard roof—were dark. He was about to call O'Malley's attention to this, when the sounds of footsteps within the house checked him.
There was a rattling of locks and bolts and the door swung open disclosing a man, grimy, old and bent, a lamp in his hand. He squinted uncertainly at them, then growled irritably as he recognized O'Malley:
"Oh, it's you. I thought you wasn't comin'? If you'd been any later you wouldn't 'a got me up."
O'Malley explained that the gentleman was detained—couldn't get away any earlier, very sorry, but they'd be quick and make no noise—just wanted to see the rooms and get out.
In single file, the janitor leading, they mounted the stairs. To the aristocratic senses of George the place seemed abominable. The staircase, narrow and without balustrade, ran up steeply between walls once painted green, now blotched and smeared. At the end of the first flight there was a small landing, a gas bracket holding aloft a tiny point of flame. It was as hot as an oven, the stifling atmosphere impregnated with mingled odors of cooking, stale cigar smoke, and the mustiness of close, unaired spaces.
On the second landing one of the doors was open, affording a glimpse of a squalid interior, and a man in his shirt sleeves bent over a table writing. He did not look up as they creaked by. From somewhere near, muffled by walls, came the thin, frail tinkling of guitar strings. As they ascended the temperature grew higher, the air held in the low attic story under the roof, baked to a sweltering heat. The janitor muttered an excuse—the top floor being vacant the windows were kept shut—it would be cool enough when they were opened.
He had gained the last landing, which broadened into a small square of hall cut by three doors. As he turned to one on the left, O'Malley slipped by him and drew away toward that on the right. There was a moment of silence, broken by the clinking of the man's keys. He had trouble in finding the right one and set his lamp down on a chair, his head bent over the bunch. George was aware of O'Malley's figure casting a huge wavering shadow up the wall, edging closer to the right hand door.
The key was found and inserted in the lock and the janitor entered the room, his lamp diffusing a yellow aura in the midst of which he moved, a black, retreating shape. With his withdrawal the light in the hall, furnished by a bead of gas, faded to a flickering obscurity. O'Malley's shadow disappeared, and George could see him as a formless oblong, pressed against the panel. There was a moment of intense stillness, the guitar tinkling faint as if coming through illimitable distances. The detective's voice rose in a whisper, vital and intimate, against the music's spectral thinness: