“Yes,” she replied – and she had eavesdropped, not an uncommon practice in an era when hotel phone calls were routed through a switchboard. Leaving the police officers, the night manager returned to the lobby and, on a hunch, asked the telephone operator if any calls had recently been made from room 1018A. “In all my years in the hotel business,” the night manager later reflected, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.” “The man that went out the window, what is his name?” one officer asked. He had been sleeping, he said, and “I heard a noise and then I woke up.” They pushed open the door to the bathroom and found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet, head in hands. Police officers entered room 1018A with guns drawn.
Two names were on the registration card: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook. After a few moments, he picked out a curtain flapping through an open window. The night manager peered up through the darkness at his hulking hotel. Then he turned and ran into the hotel lobby.
Jimmy, the doorman at the Statler hotel, was momentarily stunned. G lass shattered high above Seventh Avenue in Manhattan before dawn on a cold November morning in 1953.
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