A man with a sketch pad in hand sat with a large pink woman in a small office at the end of a long, dim corridor and made pencil lines on paper and said, ``Is this more like it, Mrs. MacReady? Or are the eyebrows more like this?'' When he had finished with that, he would go to another part of the hotel and say much the same things to someone else, most probably a busboy. ``Begin to look like him now, would you say? Different about the mouth, huh? More like this, maybe?''

Men blew dust on objects in a room on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Dumont and blew it off again, and did the same in a tiny, almost airless room in a tenement in the West Forties. And men also used vacuum cleaners in both rooms, sucking dust up once more.

Men from the Third Detective District, Eighteenth Precinct, had the longest, the most tedious, job. At the Hotel Dumont there had, at the time in issue, been twenty-three overnighters, counting couples as singular. These included, as one, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Payne, who had checked in a little after noon the day before, and had not checked out together. But Gardner Willings was not included; he had been at the Dumont for almost a week. There was, of course, no special reason to believe that the man or woman they sought had stayed only overnight at the hotel. The twenty-three (or twenty-two with the Paynes themselves omitted) provided merely a place to start, and their identification was the barest of starts. With names and addresses listed, verification came next. It would take time; it would, almost inevitably, trouble some water. (``I certainly was not at the Dumont last night and my husband couldn't have been. He's in Boston. Of course he's in'' --)