Tildy made expansive gestures. “Oh, tall. Big. Broad-shouldered. Heavy-set.”
“What was he wearing?”
They couldn’t remember. Something dark, Nikky thought. Gray, said Tildy.
“What made you decide he wasn’t from headquarters?”
“Mister Roffis and Mister Hacklin, both, had warned us,” Tildy answered, “to be on the lookout for anyone pretending to be a policeman. And of course I was suspicious right off because he’d sneaked in my bedroom that way, and hadn’t spoken to Roffis or anything.”
“Yair? So you called your bodyguard. And?”
“He ran into the bedroom. We heard an angry argument,” she glanced at Nikky for confirmation; Nikky nodded; “then the bedroom door was slammed, and we couldn’t hear anything else. But after a few minutes, I began to be frightened. I called through the closed door to Roffis, and there wasn’t any answer.”
Nikky said, “I opened the door, and there wasn’t anybody there.”
“At first,” Tildy went on, “we supposed Roffis had put the man out and was taking him to a police station or the District Attorney’s office.”
Nikky added, “But when Mister Roffis didn’t come back, we were both very scared. I begged Miss Millett to call up Mister Lanerd, across the hall.” She touched Tildy’s arm, but the skater kept watching me to see how much of it I believed.