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to punch a hole in the glass. I was pretty certain that Tarantine had gone. He wouldn’t have left me lying on the threshold if he was still inside.
    I turned the inside knob and let myself into the kitchen. Hoping the woman would take it as a signal to go away, I switched on the kitchen light. Monel metal and porcelain and brand-new off-white paint dazzled my eyes. The kitchen had everything: dishwasher, garbage disposal unit, electric range, even a big deep-freezer in the corner by the refrigerator. There was a little food in the refrigerator, milk and butter and ham and a head of lettuce, but nothing at all in the freezer. It looked as if Tarantine hadn’t intended to stay long.
    I went through the small dark dinette into the living-room and found a table-lamp, which I turned on. It cast a parchment-yellowed light on a couple of overstuffed chairs and a davenport to match, a white oak radio cabinet, a tan-colored rug of cheap frieze, a small brick fireplace. The room was so similar to a hundred thousand others that it might have been stamped out by a die. There was nothingthere to give me a clue to the people who had used it, except for a
Daily Racing Form
crumpled on one of the chairs. Even the ashtrays were empty.
    The bedroom was equally anonymous. It contained twin beds, one of which had been slept in, from the middle-income floor of a department store, a dressing-table, and a chest of drawers with nothing in the drawers. The only trace of Galley was a spilling of suntan powder on the dressing-table. Tarantine had left no trace at all, if you didn’t count the bump on the back of my head.
    Going back into the living-room, I heard a tapping on the front door. I went to the door and opened it. “What do you want?”
    “Why, nothing. I only wondered, are you quite sure you’re going to be all right here by yourself?”
    She was overdoing her Good Samaritan act. I switched on the porch light above her and looked hard into her face. It wasn’t a bad sort of face, though you might have called it moon-shaped. It had a fine mouth, wide and full and generous. The eyes were blue, slightly damaged by recent grief; the lids were puffed. She looked like a soft and easygoing woman who had come up against something hard and unexpected. Her carefully curled red hair was too bright to be natural. The fox was blue and expensive.
    “What are you looking at me like that for? Have I got a smut on my nose?”
    “I’m trying to figure out why you’re so persistent.”
    She could have taken offense, but she decided to smile instead. Her smile, complete with nose wrinkling, was in a nice old-fashioned idiom like her speech. “It isn’t every night I stumble over unconscious men, you know.”
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll lie down and you can stumble over me again. Then will you go away?”
    “I will not.” She stuck out her lower lip in an impressive pout. “I want to talk to you. What’s your name?”
    “Archer.”
    “Then you don’t really live here. It belongs to a man named Dalling. I made inquiries this afternoon.”
    I had forgotten the man with the memorable face. I pushed past her out the door and beyond the circle of light from the porch. The road was bare on the other side of the intersection, and as far as I could see. Dalling had run out long ago.
    She followed me like an embarrassing bulky shadow. “You didn’t answer my question.” Her voice was sibilant with suspicion.
    “Dalling’s my landlord,” I said.
    “What’s his first name?” Her cross-questioning technique reminded me of a grade-school teacher conducting a spelling bee.
    “Keith.”
    “I guess you really do live here, Mr. Archer. Excuse me.”
    While we were standing there on the unseeded lawn, lighting up the sky with our repartee, a pair of headlights swept up out of nowhere and slid along the road in our direction. The car passed us without stopping or even slackening speed, but my overworked glands spurted adrenalin. If Tarantine