said “COMPANION SOUGHT.”

Seventeen

I stood there on the corner under a street light just holding the paper in my hand while the pieces fell all around me. It was too much. You could get only part of it at a time.

Somebody was saying something.

“What?” I said. I folded the paper and put it under my arm. There were a half-million other copies covering the whole state like a heavy snowfall, but I had to hide this one. Companion sought. I started away. You didn’t run. You didn’t ever run. You walked, slowly.

“Hey, here’s your change. Don’t you want your change, mister?” It was the newsboy. Why did they call a man who was seventy years old a newsboy?

“Oh,” I said. “Uh—thanks. Thanks.” I put it in my pocket.

I couldn’t stand here under the light.

As fast as I got a piece of it sorted out, something else would fall on me. I couldn’t stay here. I knew that. The man already thought I was crazy or blind drunk. He was watching me.

But I couldn’t go back to the apartment with this paper. If she read it I was through.

I could hear her laughing. I was hiding her from the police for $120,000, but the police weren’t looking for her. She was dead. They were looking for me.

I had to do something. Throw it away? With the man standing there watching me and already thinking I was nuts? I looked wildly around for the car. It was parked just ahead of me. I got in and pulled out into the traffic, having no idea where I was going.

I turned right at the corner and went out toward the beach. In a minute I saw a parking place in front of a drugstore and pulled into it. There was light here. I could read the paper sitting in the car.

But even as I spread it open I knew I didn’t have to read it. I could have written it. The whole thing would fall into place like the pieces in a chess game in which you had been outclassed before you’d even started to play.

I read it anyway.

It was even worse.

I was right as far as I had guessed, but I hadn’t guessed far enough. They had found the body of Diana James, all right. And the deputy sheriff had regained consciousness at last. “Sure it was Mrs. Butler,” he said. “I threw the light right in her face. Then this guy slugged me from behind.”

Of course they hadn’t looked much alike. But they were of the same height and general build, and the same age, and they were both brunettes. There probably wasn’t even any dental work to go on, if they called in her dentist. And who was going to?

Nobody was.

Why should they? The deputy sheriff had seen her there, hadn’t he? And she had to be on her way into the building instead of out, because he had been watching it and nobody had gone in before. Then there were the shots, after he was slugged. Diana James had come through the back yard while he was unconscious. Nobody knew anything about her, anyway. She’d been gone for six months.

But I had already guessed all that. It had hit me right in the face the instant I saw the headline.

The thing I hadn’t guessed was worse. It was the clincher. It was that cop at the filling station.

I read it.

“It was the same guy, all right,” Sgt. Kennedy said flatly. “He fitted the description perfectly. And it was Finley’s car. If we’d only known then.

“Sure he was alone, I looked in the car because it had Vale County license tags. There was nobody else.”

That was it: “. . .he was alone.”

I had done a beautiful job. I had done such a wonderful job that if she got away and they picked me up they could hang me.

And all she had to do was walk out the door. She was free.

I could feel the greasy sweat on the palms of my hands and the emptiness inside me as I forced myself to read it all. They repeated my description. It was good. That blonde hellcat had an eye for detail. She hadn’t missed a thing. My eyes caught the last paragraph.

“There was something about his face that seemed familiar,” Charisse Finley said. “I keep thinking I’ve seen him somewhere before. Or a picture of him.”

I took a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it with shaking fingers. That added the finishing