STILETTO HEIST.(The Talk of the Town)

Next time you're eating at 60 Thompson and you happen to spot someone wearing white Habitual jeans, humming along to the new Madonna song, paying for his meal with a two-hundred-dollar gift certificate, and hobbling around on four-inch metallic-striped wedges that may be several sizes too small, call 911. There's no cash reward, but you stand to reap untold bounty in luxury footwear. You may have helped to nab the stiletto bandit, a thief who has eluded N.Y.P.D. detectives since burgling the garment-district showroom of the French cobbler Christian Louboutin.

"He kicked through the wall," Shawna Rose, Louboutin's public-relations director, said the other day, pointing to a large, jagged crater just to the left of the office's front door. "When I got off the elevator, I saw piles and piles of drywall and fibreglass. The door was wide open. My first thought, even though it wasn't logical, was water damage." The date was June 26th, a Monday morning. Rose went through the door, only to come upon a scene out of an especially hellacious sample sale. Shoeboxes and lids askew. Tissue paper everywhere. Lefts without rights strewn across the room, their trademark scarlet soles upturned like pools of blood in a Brian De Palma movie.

The robber, Rose realized, had selected his quarry with a finicky precision equally reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer and Diana Vreeland. In addition to stealing various things that were lying around the office--Rose's white jeans, the restaurant voucher, "only my best CDs," petty cash, computers--he also carefully picked through hundreds of pairs of shoes, rejecting the most lavish styles for those of a more avant-garde sensibility. European 38s and 40s were the preferred sizes. "Whoever did this was very particular," Rose said. (The rigor of the thief's aesthetic seems to have been lost on the police, who, according to Detective Dennis Laffin, noted in a report that "unknown individual forced their way into location" and "removed between twenty to forty boxes of shoes of a high-end quality." The report ...