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bachelor's kitchen. He was all finished and ready to start on another part of the house when he remembered something. He got a table knife from the silverware drawer, took down the flour canister from its shelf, and took the top off. He poked the knife down into it, poked and pried around, and there wasn't anything in there but flour.
     
    That wasn't right. There should have been a tobacco pouch down in there, with twenty fifty-dollar bills rolled in it; Joe Sheer's run-out money. He'd kept it there just in case he ever had to leave here too fast to close out bank accounts, and a couple of years ago he'd mentioned to Parker where he had it stashed.
     
    Now it was gone, and it didn't make any sense for it to be gone. There was no sign anywhere around that anybody else had searched this place, which meant it wasn't taken by somebody just stumbling on it but by somebody who knew it was there all along. Who else could that be but Joe Sheer? But if Joe had taken that money, five minutes later he'd have been out of town; the thousand bucks in the flour canister was getaway financing exclusively, not to be used for anything else.
     
    Parker put the canister back where it belonged, washed the flour from the knife, dried the knife and put it away again in the silverware drawer. Then he left the kitchen, going through a doorway that led to a central hallway about six feet long. Every room in the house led off this hallway; living-room, two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen. The cellar stairs were off this hallway, and a trap-door in the hallway ceiling led to the narrow cramped attic.
     
    Parker went into the living-room next. It was a small room, made to look even smaller because of the bulkiness and darkness of the furniture. Joe Sheer had liked an older style of furniture, the kind of heavy round stuff that went with tasselled lamp shades and fringed shawls. Parker stood just inside the doorway and looked around, and the room looked no different from the last time he'd been here. There was a new television set, but it was in an old-style cabinet that blended in well with the furniture already there.
     
    Looking around the room, Parker happened to see the thermostat on the wall near the front door, and it occurred to him that the house was warm. He hadn't paid any attention to that when he'd first come in, because it only seemed natural that the house should be warm; but it wasn't natural at all. This house was supposed to be empty now, was supposed to have been empty for the last two or three days. Somebody should have come along by now to shut the place up.
     
    He went over and looked at the thermostat. It was set for seventy, and the little thermometer on it read the same. So the furnace was still going, and the electricity was still turned on.
     
    And the phone?
     
    It was over on a rickety-looking end table next to the sofa. Parker went over and picked it up and listened for a second to the sound of the dial tone. It was still working.
     
    He hung up the phone and looked around at the room. Somebody wanted this place to stay liveable, and he didn't know why.
     
    He couldn't get a corner on it, not a corner.
     
    He went on searching the place, for whatever he might find. The living-room had nothing more beyond the thermostat and the telephone of interest to him. He poked and pried and found nothing. Nothing under the chairs, nothing under the sofa cushions or behind the small water-colour landscapes on the walls, nothing written or hidden in any of the few books on the shelf behind the sofa, nothing anywhere of interest.
     
    Parker limited himself to looking in places he could get at without taking anything apart, so there still could be a million dollars in jewels hidden inside the sofa back or ten pounds of uncut heroin in the speaker cavity of the television set or several notes in invisible ink written on the lamp shades, but he doubted any of it. He finished the living-room, found nothing, and went on.
     
    Next was the