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cream, tooth powder, toothpaste, a pair of toothbrushes, two plastic-handled throwaway razors. Why won’t Westover be back tomorrow? Why won’t the kid? Something red sparked in the shag weave of a bathmat. He bent for it. A capsule. He checked druggist’s amber plastic vials in the medicine chest. No Seconals. But he thought this was a Seconal. In the kitchen a few unwashed dishes were stacked on a sink counter. On a breakfast bar like the one at Scotty Dekker’s across the street, slices of dark bread had slumped from a clear plastic wrapper and dried out. A quarter-inch of milk had soured in the bottom of a tall glass. Butter had puddled in its oblong dish. Cheese slices were growing green mold in their open packet. A half-empty jar of mayonnaise gaped, its lid beside it. A fly had died in the mayonnaise. Ferns hung in baskets over the breakfast bar. The fronds were drying out and turning brown. He rinsed the milk glass at the sink and watered the ferns.
    Back in the den, he sat in the chair that had a tall padded leather back and padded leather arms and that swiveled, could turn to the desk, could turn to the typewriter table. Typed sheets lay stacked on the desk, facedown. A half-typed sheet was in the typewriter. It was a late-model electric typewriter. He switched on a desk lamp and peered at the typing. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Something about making sure the mark didn’t telephone the bank. He turned over the stack of pages. “Confessions of a Con Man , ” the top page read, “by Howie O’Rourke, as told to Charles Westover.” Dave put on his glasses and leafed through the pages. An introduction claimed that O’Rourke knew every swindle cunning and greed had devised since time began, had worked most of them, and had spent years in prison for getting caught at it. This book was going to tell all—no one who read it could ever be flim-flammed out of his hard-earned money again. Dave checked the rest of the typescript, didn’t find anything about insurance frauds, laid the sheets back together, tapped the edges on the dusty desk-top to straighten them, laid the stack on its face again, and rose to look into a brown steel file cabinet. In a folder labeled with the title of the book he found copies of query letters to twenty publishers. The letters asked for an advance of $200,000. Twelve publishers had replied. Negatively. None had even made a counteroffer.
    Dave heard a noise. Not the wind. He slipped the folder back, quietly closed the file drawer, and switched off the desk lamp. Taking off his glasses, he moved in the dark to the door of the den and stood there listening, straining to hear. He had turned off the lights in each of the rooms as he left it. His eyes strained against the darkness. What had the noise been? The garage door. It went up and down on armatures and these were equipped with big springs which sang baritone when they stretched. That was what he had heard faintly. But the house was dead quiet, the night, the neighborhood, except for the snore of the wind under the eaves and, far off, the surf. He waited, heartbeats thudding in his ears. He thought he heard the soft click of a door latch. He didn’t listen for footfalls. There was all that thick carpeting. Then a girl’s voice, tentative, timid, called:
    “Lyle? Are you here?”
    Light glowed at the end of the hall. He went toward it. He said, “Lyle isn’t here.” He came out into the room with the harpsichord. Lamps glowed in the room, and a girl was standing on the far side of the room, a fat girl whose hips bulged in too-tight jeans. Her big shoulders and bulky bosom were covered by a hand-loomed Mexican pullover, red, yellow, orange, with its hood laid back. She wore wire-rimmed, round glasses, and her hair was long, straight, straw-color. She looked surprised but not scared. He said, “Who are you?”
    She said, “Who are you?”
    “I’m an insurance investigator,” he said, “and my name is Dave Brandstetter.