Robert Novello Private Investigations is located on the ground floor of a 19^th century, four-story apartment building on MacDougal Street. It’s half a block from the house in which Louisa May Alcott created Little Women, and a short walk to the club where Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven. I knew those sites, and others in what I called Literary Old New York, because I’d explored them eagerly when I first came to the city as an eighteen-year-old freshman at Columbia.

I pressed the bell labeled “Novello, One B.” After identifying myself, and being buzzed in, I hurried down the hallway.

Bobby stood in his doorway, and greeted me with an exaggerated Groucho Marx leer. “Heh, heh, heh—come into my lair, young woman.”

I gave his extended hand a friendly squeeze. Although his grip was gentle, his arms and shoulders were corded with muscles. His hands were strong—toughened through years of martial arts. I’d seen Bobby in an exhibition a few weeks ago, when he split a cement block in half with a single blow from one of those hands.

With his lively hazel eyes and the rose gold hair that cascaded over a high forehead to curl just above his eyebrows, Bobby was one of the best-looking men I knew. But his handsome face was not what most people noticed first. Bobby is a Little Person, a dwarf standing four feet tall. His torso is as broad as that of a man of so-called normal height, but his legs are abnormally short.

I liked coming downtown to Bobby’s home office. No matter what problem was worrying me, I always smiled with pleasure at the sight of Bobby’s beloved exotic birds in their huge, antique cages. The musical trills and cheeps of what poet James Thomson called these “merry minstrels of the morn” seemed to rise in greeting to me.

I saluted Bobby’s feathered friends. “Hi, guys.”

Gesturing for me to sit in his red leather client’s chair, Bobby stepped on an antique footstool and from there settled into the wing chair behind his desk. With the lemon yellow couch to my left, and the red leather chair positioned next to a table that was perfect for writing a check, Bobby had replicated the home office of Nero Wolfe in those Rex Stout mystery novels. And, like Wolfe for his clients, Bobby had done excellent work for me when I’d hired him previously.

Watching me with studied casualness, Bobby asked, “What can I do for you this time, pretty lady?”

“I want you to find a missing child,” I said. “A girl. I don’t care how much you have to spend.”

Bobby grinned. “Music to my ears, but I’m on a case that’s going to take another two or three weeks to wrap up. Will that time-frame be a problem for you?”

I was almost relieved. “No. Finish what you’re doing.”

“Good.” Bobby took a fresh notebook from the top drawer, opened it to the first page, and selected a pen from the collection standing in the red and white Love of My Life coffee mug I had given him a few months earlier, when I discovered he was a fan of our show. Pen in hand, Bobby asked, “What’s the child’s date of birth?”

“I don’t know precisely.”

Bobby shrugged. “No big deal. Where was she born?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s her name?"

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

Bobby laid the pen across the blank page in his notebook, planted his elbows on the desk, leaned forward and asked, “Did you have a baby and give it up for adoption and now you want to find her?”

“No, that’s not it.” Until this moment, I hadn’t been entirely sure I’d be able to tell Bobby the truth. Making the appointment to see him was a big first step. Now I was about to take a bigger one. “The child is me. I want you to find out who I am.”