I thought of Saudi Arabia, of 120-degree heat and sand and the wind blowing for two years, and wondered if I could take it. But before long it wasn’t going to be a question of whether I could stand it or not. I had to do something. I made less money every year.

You got your brains beat out for four years for seventy dollars a month plus your tuition and having some old grad pounding you on the back to get into the pictures after you’d scored from eight yards out in the last three seconds of play in the Homecoming game, and five years later the son-of-a-bitch couldn’t remember your name when you tried to send it in past the arctic blonde in the outer office.

I put a cigarette in my mouth, reaching for the lighter, and then let it hang there, forgotten. Half of $120,000...

I shrugged irritably. Was I going to start that again? Maybe I was going back to believing in Santa Claus. Diana James was just a victim of wishful thinking, trying to build something out of a half-baked theory. But still, she didn’t quite strike me as that kind of featherhead.

Why was she so sure? That was the thing I couldn’t see. It didn’t match up with the flimsy evidence of her story. And why hadn’t the police found him? Something rang there, too. They should have picked him up long ago, a big, good-looking guy like that with no place to hide. I didn’t know much about police work, but it seemed to me embezzlers should be the easiest of all lamsters to collar; the people who were looking for them knew too much about them. They’d have pictures of him, a complete knowledge of all his habits, everything. His car had been abandoned here in a city of four hundred thousand, and then he had vanished like a wisp of smoke. It could happen. But the odds were very long against it.

The whole thing was just crazy enough to make you wonder.

And the amount was too big to get out of your mind.

I cursed, and went back down to the car. I drove over to the library and asked for the back files of the Sanport Citizen. Beginning with the first of August, I worked back toward June. In the fourth paper I found another story on it. It was datelined Sanport, July 27.

NO SOLUTION IN BUTLER DISAPPEARANCE

After nearly two months of a nationwide manhunt, police announced today there has been no new light whatever thrown on the possible whereabouts of the Mount Temple bank official who allegedly absconded with $120,000 of the bank’s funds. Since the discovery on June 11 of Butler’s car, abandoned on a local street near the beach...

Well, there wasn’t anything new in that, except the fact that they definitely hadn’t found him.