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something to do, anyway. I winked at pretty girls and one or two of them even smiled back.
    I didn’t notice anybody following me. But that may have been because I didn’t look.
    Maybe I should have.
    I didn’t hear the bullet until it passed me.
    I was in my building, on the way up the stairs. When I was a few steps from the landing there was a loud noise behind me. I was already falling on my face when the bullet buried itself in the wall. Plaster flew at my face.
    Instinct said: Stay still, don’t move. Instinct gave bad advice. Whoever he was, he was behind me and he was shooting at me and I made a hell of a good target.
    But instinct’s got a compelling voice. By the time I managed to spin around—it’s tricky when you’re on your hands and knees on a staircase—he was gone. A door closed behind him and I looked at nothing.
    “Mr. London?”
    I looked up. Mrs. Glendower was leaning a gray head over the railing. Her expression was mildly puzzled.
    “That wasn’t a gunshot, was it? Or didn’t you hear the noise?”
    I got straightened out on my feet and tried to look sheepish. “Just a truck backfiring,” I told her.
    “It frightened me, Mr. London.”
    I managed to grin. “You’re not the only one, Mrs. Glendower. It startled me so badly I nearly fell over. I’ve been nervous lately.”
    That was the perfect explanation as far as Mrs. Glendower was concerned. She smiled vaguely and pleasantly. Then she went away.
    I went into my apartment and had a shot of cognac, then I went back into the hallway and looked at the hole in the wall. When I sighted from the bullet hole to the doorway I knew the gunman hadn’t been trying to kill me at all. The bullet was way out of line. He must have missed me by five feet.
    He could have been a lousy shot. But he didn’t even make a second try—just one shot and away he went.
    So it was a warning. A little message from the guy on the phone, the one with the raspy voice.
    Fine.
    I found a can of spackling paste in a drawer and patched up the hole in the wall, giving the bullet a permanent home. I let the paste dry, which didn’t take long, and dabbed a little paint over it. It wasn’t a perfect match but I didn’t figure everybody in the world was going to come staring at my wall.
    Then I went back inside and sat down.
    It was an algebraic equation with too many unknowns. X was the killer, the voice on the phone. He shot the girl, searched the apartment and ran. Then Jack came in, looked around and ran. Then somebody else came, rearranged things, stripped the girl and ran. Then I came, carted off the body—and now everything was happening.
    It didn’t add up. And, like an algebraic equation, it wouldn’t add up. Not until I knew all the unknowns.
    In the meantime I had nothing to do, no place to go. There was a bullet in the wall outside my door and it wasn’t worth the trouble to dig it out. What the hell was it going to prove? It might be a .32 or .38 slug. So what? I couldn’t find out anything one way or the other, not that way.
    So to hell with it.
    I took a book from the bookcase and sat down with it. I read three pages, looked up suddenly and realized I didn’t remember a word that I’d read. I put the book back on the shelf and poured more cognac. Nothing was working out.
    And I was tied in deep. Jack was clear—I’d seen to that, rushing around like a goddam hero. But I was hanging by my thumbs. The bastard who shot a hole in Sheila knew who I was and where I lived and I didn’t know a thing about him. And he had some damn fool idea that I had a package that he wanted. I was supposed to sell it to him.
    There was only one catch. I didn’t have it. I didn’t even know what the hell it was.
    Which complicated things. Jack was free and clear—he could go back to his wife, back to my sister. He could pretend that everything was all right with the world.
    I couldn’t.
    I put music on the hi-fi and tried to listen to it. I hauled out my wallet and