"Well done, Mr. Wilson. We are here in record time, I am sure."

I stepped out without waiting for the servant's assistance and handed the now evenly breathing secretary onto the white limestone sidewalk. Beyond the shining peaked chateau at 660 Fifth Avenue loomed the dark Gothic spires of a mighty church. The other mansions along the street seemed as somber and forbidding as a Lower East Side tenement compared to the fanciful Vanderbilt edifice.

It was odd to contemplate "mansions" so contained, more like dark, Italianate crypts than the much-added-onto sprawl of London's great houses. Of course London mansions had been imposing since the sixteenth century, and poor Fifth Avenue was a mere upstart of forty years at best, for I understood that commercial buildings were ever being driven farther north by these millionaires' exercises in instant opulence.

We dashed up the paltry six steps leading to the entry. A waiting butler held the door open so as not to impede our progress. From first glance the house showed itself not to be what it seemed, which I find an interesting comment on the persons who inhabited it. The pale stone walls had been carved into the likeness of well-fringed fabrics.

Dark carpets floated on snowy stone floors in the wide hall beyond that extended perhaps sixty feet to an elaborate pair of doors.

"We must hurry," Mr. Wilson urged.

"First I must know which is the room."

"There! Ahead. To the right."

"The first or second door?"

Mr. Wilson cast an anxious look at the impassive butler who had taken our hats and my walking stick.

"The second."

Nodding, I led the way down the hall, along the stone and sparing the carpet any more impressions than it bore already.

"And this first room to the left?" I asked.

"The Grinling Gibbons room, for small receptions or daytime callers."

Pale stone, carved within an inch of its life with geometrical and floral patterns paneled the walls. "Grinling Gibbons?" I asked. "Was he not the author of a treatise on ancient Rome?"

Mr. Wilson eyed me with some of Watson's amazement. "He was the noted seventeenth-century carver and sculptor, nothing to do with Romans."

"Ah." All this decorative busywork was a rather trivial pursuit in my opinion. "And the room we hasten to?"

Mr. Wilson stopped and seemed to gather himself. "The billiard room, sir."

"Hmmm." I was not optimistic about encountering anything truly fearful in a chamber as frivolous as a billiard room. So far the floors had been disappointingly blank, not a spec of dust allowed to sully their surfaces. The carpeting looked as if it had been cleaned by one of those devilish electrified machines that Americans favored, which sucked up and swallowed anything in the nature of a clue.

Even as I noted the stunning size and scale of the place, a well-upholstered woman descended the grand staircase to the right. She was as handsome and adamant as Lady Liberty in the New York Harbor, although attired in the expensive fripperies that pass for the latest Paris fashions, which somehow did not flatter her overshot lower jaw that spoke of bulldog resolve.

My guide stiffened as he spied her, so I watched her imperious advance much as a courtier might await a royal personage coming abreast.

When she arrived even with us, her gaze was only for my conductor. He bowed his head at her passage. Her sharp footsteps never faltered, and I was accorded only the slightest glance and that at my clothing.

The door behind us opened to admit the clatter of Fifth Avenue. I heard the butler murmur that madam's carriage was awaiting at the curb. Then the door closed again and we were left to the lonely silence of a mausoleum.

Mr. Wilson swallowed audibly.

"Mrs. Vanderbilt, I take it?"

He only nodded. I surmised that he would not be displeased if some unearthly force took Mrs. Vanderbilt from us all. America prided itself for its egalitarianism, but it struck me that its queens of society were as imperious as any Empress of All the Russias.

I was also struck by the difference between these two American women, Mrs. Vanderbilt and the woman, Madam Irene. Mrs. Norton was infinitely more comely if not less expensively attired, but Mrs. Vanderbilt moved as if she commanded every creature within her purview, man or mouse. And as if man would soon be reduced to mouse. Madam Irene was in admirable command of herself, but did not seek to erase the presence of others, witness how she had tended the poor injured churchman I had played to gain entry to her house in St. John's Wood when we first met two years earlier.

Had I played the same disabled role with Mrs. Vanderbilt as she entered her carriage, she would no doubt have used me as stepping-stone.

American women, I was beginning to suspect, were like their sisters everywhere, not to be trusted, but in addition as willful as wolverines.

"This way, sir." My guide was polishing his ruddy perspiration-dewed cheeks with his handkerchief.

And so we proceeded down that wide hallway, our bootheels the only sound in that palatial expanse.

As we passed the grand curving stairway from which Mrs. Vanderbilt had descended, I spied a dark-haired elfin sprite crouched at the top of the stairs, gazing down on us wistfully.

My work occasionally had brought me into grand halls and palaces, but none so oppressive as this, despite the light-colored stone of its construction.

At a pair of ornate wooden doors, Mr. Wilson stopped, tapping upon his game leg with impatience.

I stood back to let Mr. Wilson open the doors, but he then beckoned me inside and whirled to shut the doors behind us as if sealing out Satan himself.

He had moved so fast I could not object that he had disarranged the threshold before I could examine it.

A familiar stench filled the room, undignified death in its most disagreeable form. I catalogued the immediately obvious contents of the large chamber. Its centerpiece was a billiard table set upon ornate wooden legs so stout and swollen they seemed to suffer from gout. Enough gilt fringe to circle several lampshades dangled from the corner pockets. Gilt metal inlay, probably gold, glinted from every curve in the carving.

The thing more resembled some bloated pagan altar than a gaming table. Over it hung an immense branched electric lamp of brass and opaque stained glass.

And on its green felt surface, the only ordinary thing about the table, lay a form that was the source of odor, arms stretched out and . . .

A soberly dressed fellow stood near a massive sofa several feet from the billiard table.

I spoke. "I must examine the entire room thoroughly, from the bottom up. Starting with the threshold. Mr. Wilson, if you will open the doors again."

"No one in the house must know." The man by the sofa's voice creaked with recent disuse, but it held a modicum of command.

"Mr. William K. Vanderbilt, I presume." I faced a man of no great height, but of regular, even bland, barefaced features, most notable for the waves of dark hair parted in the middle.

"Who is this dead man?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"You have no idea why he's in your house? Are any servants or workmen missing?"

"I'm not about to upset the house with such inquiries, but everything has been perfectly normal this morning. One would never know-" His glance slid toward the table, then avoided it. "No one in the house must suspect any problem. Your investigation must be completely discreet."

"Then I require your patience. It is crucial that the floor and furnishings of the room be as untrampled as possible. The sooner I make my examination, the sooner those doors can be bolted again."

He finally nodded, and Wilson opened first one, then the other door, gazing anxiously down the hall.

But no one approached and I was soon on hands and knees, magnifying glass a monocle before my right eye, surveying the hallway stone for any mite of evidence.

"How often are the floors swept?" I asked.

From the silence I knew that both men regarded my posture with amazement.

"I may look as if I'm playing a schoolroom game, gentlemen, but you have no idea how many conclusions may be gathered from the testimony of the trail a pair of shoes or boots may leave on stone and carpeting. I see, for instance, that Mr. Wilson was the first to discover this tragedy when he entered the room before breakfast this morning."

"How, sir, would you know that?" he said.

"Beyond the inequity of the depth in this set of impressions on the carpet, here they are made by shoes with an arch, so only sole and heel show. You, sir," I noted to the master of the house, "are dressed, but still shod in leather house slippers. These flat, potato-shaped impressions reveal almost the entire foot. Obviously you were urgently summoned here by Mr. Wilson from the breakfast table, where, I also perceive, you enjoyed a finnan haddie in asparagus sauce."

"Are you a chef, man, or a detective?" the businessman huffed.

"That is a very fine-figured smoking jacket, Mr. Vanderbilt, but the paisley can't conceal the dropped fragments of your final forkful at Mr. Wilson's obviously urgent summons.

"Scared the living kidney pie out of me," Mr. Vanderbilt admitted. "And . . . this." He glanced at the top of the billiards table with a shudder. "I am a man of industry and a yachtsman, but no hunter or meat dresser. I am lucky that more of my breakfast doesn't adorn my jacket front."

"Indeed. If you gentlemen will remain standing where you are, I'll complete my examination of the floor. Then you may leave."

Mr. Vanderbilt raised an eyebrow at my instructions, but said nothing. I had quickly realized that he was used to heeding domestic directions. I had only to seize the reins and he would go where I led.

"What disposition do you plan to make of the body when my examination is done?" I asked.

"No one must know, most particularly my wife. She would wish never to set foot in this house again. It cost three millions six years ago and would cost a million more today."

"The body must be removed and an autopsy performed," I said. "I am not a medical man. And then buried."

"Wilson will see to that. I have influence with the authorities, so they will remove the remains discreetly. Fortunately the house is large, with a maze of service areas at the rear. This truly unfortunate fellow will pass out of this house as discreetly as a drunkard from my wife's dinner party last night."

Answered if not satisfied, I bent back to my task, crawling my way around the room's perimeter in narrowing circles until I came up short on one of the billiard table's gargantuan legs. One would think I was kowtowing before one of the ancient world's wonders, the Colossus of Rhodes.

My labors had given me little more than a pocketful of rye: a few tiny and sere blades of grass tracked in from the nearby park, no doubt.

I nodded at the master of the house, and a great many more things, as I stood. "I will do the rest alone."

Vanderbilt skated on his flat-soled slippers to the door, erasing my tracks as well as his own and Wilson's, the sizes of which I had paused to record in a pocket notebook.

"Wilson will wait outside the door until you are done, Mr. Holmes, then escort you to my library, where we will talk. In the meantime I will call those discreet enough to remove the er . . . cadaver."

I nodded, or bowed, depending on how the observer wished to take it. Both men left the room and closed the door.

For a moment I mulled my astounding conclusion: other than the foot marks of Mssrs. Vanderbilt and Wilson, and now my own, there were no other foot tracks in the room. None.

I glanced at the savaged body on the green felt.

The feet were bare.

Ah, now what would Watson title a story on this grisly corpse in the millionaire's billiard room? An American Conundrum, perhaps, though I feared it would be nothing so tasteful. Perhaps "The Adventure of the Barefoot Corpse?"

I bent to the second, more repellent stage of my work, wishing my physician friend were here to put the purest mayhem I had ever witnessed-save for the depredations beneath Paris this past spring-into the distancing drone of a medical opinion.

4.

CLOTHES THAT MAKE THE WOMAN.

When he tried in vain

To raise Her to His embrace . . .

She bounded off . . . as she knew

He could not touch her, so was tolerant

He had cared totry. . . .

-ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, "AURORA LEIGH"