I wanted an apartment living room with a corner location and a door scanner. It wasn't as bad as it sounded—the scanner was a new gadget at that time. Not many apartment buildings would have it. There was always the chance, of course, that an individual had had one installed on his own, but that was a worry I could postpone.
I put in a hectic day of trudging through apartment buildings and squabbling with superintendents, but we found it the next morning, in a stubby little seven-story building on South Central. It was one of those apartment buildings that went up way back in 1990, when the city decided it couldn't afford the luxury of open spaces and opened part of old Central Park to apartment buildings. This one was a midget among the other buildings in that development, but it had been remodeled recently. It had scanner screens.
After the usual protests, the superintendent showed me around. Most of the occupants weren't home. He let me into a rear apartment on the sixth floor, and I took one look and caught my breath.
I pulled out my sketch, though I had it memorized by this time, and moved across the room to get the right angle. The sofa was there—it was an old-fashioned job with a back. What had been a bright blotch in the picture turned out to be a mirror. A blur by the sofa was a low table. A chair was in the wrong place, but that could have been moved. What was I thinking about? It was going to be moved. Every detail checked.
"Stella Emerson," the superintendent said. "Miss Stella Emerson—I think. She never gave me no trouble. Something wrong?"
"Not a thing," I said. "I want some information from her."
"I dunno when she's home."
Her next-door neighbor did. I went back to headquarters and picked up the loose ends on the attempt to identify our assailant-to-be. No luck.
And at six o'clock that evening, I was having a cup of coffee with Miss Stella Emerson.
She was the sort of person it's always a joy to interview. Alert, understanding, cooperative—none of that petty, temperamental business about invasion of privacy. She was brunette and twenty-six or twenty-seven, maybe five feet four, a hundred and ten pounds. The pounds were well distributed, and she was darned nice looking.