The Big Bite

2
He picked his hat off the floor and stood up. “Well, that’s about it. Thanks for sparing the time.”
“Not at all,” I said.
When he was gone I took a quick shower and lay down on the bed with a cigarette. It burned down to the end and I lit another as the sun went down and twilight thickened inside the room. It was all crazy, but several things stood out like moles on a bubble-dancer. The first was that for some reason he didn’t think Cannon had been killed in that wreck. Not in the wreck itself, or as a result of it. Why? A man goes off the road and crashes at sixty miles an hour and when they sift him out of the wreckage with his head knocked in you wonder if he died of gastric ulcers? No. Purvis believed he had been murdered after the crash. But still he wouldn’t admit it.
Maybe, though, the latter was understandable, if you looked at it correctly. He had somebody in mind, but you didn’t go around making irresponsible statements like that until you had some proof to back them up. The police had already written it off as a traffic fatality, so he’d have his neck out a mile. The slandered party could sue the insurance company.
The next thing that stuck out was that it wouldn’t make any difference at all as far as the insurance company was concerned whether he’d died in the wreck or been murdered by somebody after the wreck—unless the beneficiary of the insurance policy was involved in the murder. If somebody else tagged him out they still had to pick up the tab, as far as I knew. The beneficiary would no doubt be his widow. Therefore, he had his eye on Mrs. Cannon. That tied in perfectly, because it was Mrs. Cannon he kept asking about. He couldn’t understand why I’d never seen her the whole time I was there, why she’d never come to the hospital. I was one up on him in that department. After looking at the picture, I was pretty sure I knew why she hadn’t. She didn’t want to come anywhere near me because she was afraid I might recognize her.
No, I thought; at best it was just a guess. That might be it, or it might not. I’d never thought about it particularly while I was in the hospital, and just assumed she was overcome with grief and didn’t want to be reminded of the wreck any more than she had to. It didn’t matter to me; as far as I was concerned I’d already seen enough of the Cannon family. And there was no reason, actually, that she had to; she had no connection with the accident. She wasn’t even in the car with him when he rode me off the pavement. Her lawyer and the insurance adjuster had taken care of smoothing down my hackles and working out a settlement that looked fair to me at the time. So why should she show up?
But then, again, when you thought about it, why shouldn’t she? Purvis had intimated she wasn’t grief-stricken quite to the point of throwing herself on the funeral pyre. And in five weeks she might have dropped around for a couple minutes some afternoon between the first and second cocktails and said, “I’m sorry my husband knocked your leg off. Here’s a roll of Scotch tape.”
So maybe she had avoided me deliberately. She knew I’d seen her out there near the lake less than fifteen minutes before the wreck and would probably recognize her if I saw her again. But I’d never mentioned the fact to anybody, so presumably I didn’t know just who it was I’d seen. If it were just any woman, it was of no importance; if it were Mrs. Cannon maybe it became highly significant. Why? Was she supposed to have been somewhere else at the time? I didn’t know, but one thing was certain as hell, if she didn’t want anybody to know she’d been out there, she would have been very careful to stay away from me.
But why was Purvis digging into it after all this time? It had been five months. Surely they must have had to pay off on the insurance policy before this, and when they paid you’d think they would write it off and close it. It didn’t make sense.
There was one more thing that didn’t make a lot of sense, and that was why I’d told Purvis I’d never seen her. It was just a hunch, and I still wasn’t sure why I’d done it. Well, I thought, I wasn’t Purvis’s mother, was I? Let him dig up his own information; he sure as hell hadn’t dislocated his jaw telling me anything. There was another angle, too. Suppose something a little funny had been going on out there that evening; the chump on the side-lines that got run over wasn’t Purvis. It was John Harlan.
I got up and dressed, and went out to dinner. It was a little after nine when I came back to the room with a copy of Field & Stream and tried to read. It was no use. I kept seeing a picture of a very lovely and very wealthy brunette who became widowed and even richer while I lay there with a Buick in my lap. Toss that seal a fish, Jeeves, so he’ll stop barking. Five thousand will do. The telephone rang. I reached over to the table beside the bed and picked it up.
“Harlan?” a man’s voice said. “This is Purvis again—”
“You still in town?” I asked.
“No. At home. I work out of the Houston office, or did I tell you? But what I called about—there was something else I wanted to ask. you. That convertible top was down? Right?”
“Sure,” I said, frowning. “Why?”
“You were alone, of course; but do you remember whether you had anything in the seat beside you?”
“On the seat? Not that I remember. But what difference—?”
“Just something I got to wondering about,” he said easily. “Not important at all. But you know how it is; you get to working on one these things and you keep trying to get the whole picture—”
He went on. It was a pretty fair snow job, but it would take a better one to make you stop wondering why he’d asked a crazy question like that.
“—so the seat was empty?” he wound up.
“Of course,” I said. “That is, except for some dirty clothes.”
“Clothes?”
“A bag of laundry I was taking into town.”
“Laundry?” There was the faintest hint of excitement in his voice. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I don’t get it. I thought you said you were going to town to see a movie. It was after eight p.m., and all the laundries would be closed—”
I sighed. “You paying for this call?”
“Sure. But—”
“All right. As long as I’m not being nicked for the toll charges, I don’t mind going into a long-winded song and dance about some goofy thing that doesn’t amount to a damn. There’s a kid, see, at a filling station there in town. Just finished high school, and has an athletic scholarship at S.M.U. Or T.C.U. Or one of those Southwestern Conference schools. He knows who I am. Or used to be, I should say. He’s a football maniac, so if I asked him he’d wash the clothes himself with Lux flakes and dry ‘em by blowing his breath on ‘em. I intended to leave the bundle there at the station and have him call a laundry route man to pick it up the next morning. Save me a trip into town during the day when I could be fishing. That wrap it up?”
“Sure. I didn’t quite catch his uncle’s name, and when he was baptized, but you can call me collect from Omaha—”
“Well, you asked.”
“So I did. It was a pretty good-sized bundle, huh?”
“I’m afraid I’ve lost the check list,” I said wearily. “If it makes any difference how many dirty socks I had on hand in March—”
“I mean, it wasn’t just a couple of shirts?”
“No. It was a whole bunch of stuff in a white laundry bag. Some sheets, blankets, and so on, from the cabin—”
“Uh-uh,” he said slowly.
“I don’t scan you,” I said. “What difference—?”
“Just an angle,” he. Said casually. “As you say, it doesn’t amount to a damn. Thanks a lot, Harlan. See you—”
“Hey, hold it,” I said. It was too late. I heard the phone click as he hung up.
I sat on the side of the bed and lit a cigarette. Reading was out-of the question now, and sleep was impossible. A bundle of laundry on the seat beside me—why the hell had he been interested in a stupid thing like that? Something about the way he had said, “Uh-uh,” told me that was exactly what he’d been hoping to learn.
Try again, I thought. Go back over the whole thing. Everybody’s missed it so far—everybody but Purvis. Look. Secondary road, with practically no traffic on it, this joker comes up behind you going very fast, drunk as a skunk, passes, cuts in— Why? Well, obviously, because he was too drunk to drive. But if he was that drunk and driving that fast, why hadn’t he crashed before? It would be thirty miles back to any place he could have got that kind of a bun on, unless he was carrying his supplies with him. No. That wasn’t an answer. It was luck. Coincidence. A drunk can smash up anywhere. It was just the bounce of the ball that it happened to be me he’d leaned on.
You’re still missing it, I told myself. That’s exactly the way everybody else has figured it from the beginning, but Purvis is looking at it from a different angle altogether. He’s got a bundle of laundry mixed up in it. Why? Because it was lying in the seat. It was in a white bag— I stopped then and sat very still on the side of the bed. Was that where we’d all gone off the track? Taking it for granted Cannon was drunk? Maybe he hadn’t been. Suppose he’d crashed me deliberately? And then somebody had killed him, caved his head in while he was lying unconscious in the wreck?
No, hell, I thought. It was too fantastic. But was it? I knew something that even Purvis didn’t know—but probably suspected. Mrs. Cannon was out there at the lake that evening. Suppose Cannon had been looking for her, believing she was out there with somebody. Maybe he came out of the swamp road behind me, trying to get a look at who was in the car. He caught up with me, with his headlights splashing against the back of the car, and saw I was alone. The top was down; it would be obvious there was nobody with me. Then, just as he was passing, for a fraction of a second he caught a glimpse of somebody bent over or crouched down in the seat beside me, hiding from the lights. So he blew his stack completely.
But nobody could be that crazy. He’d be taking a chance of crashing himself—which he did. A man would have to be absolutely berserk to do a thing like that. Well, how did I know he wasn’t? I didn’t even know him, to say nothing of having any idea of what was sloshing around in his mind as he came up behind me. Maybe he thought I was somebody else. Maybe he didn’t care if he did kill himself along with her. Maybe— There were a dozen possibilities.
But still it was moonshine—unless you had more to go on than that. Purvis had, or he’d never have started digging into it. I had to talk to him again. But what good would that do? He wouldn’t give you the time of day; he was too cagey. Yes, but he didn’t have to tell me anything; I could find out a lot by watching the direction his questions took. That had worked pretty well so far. I could call him and tell him I’d just remembered some goofy thing that might have a bearing on it, and get him started again. Then I stopped. I couldn’t call him tonight; I didn’t even know his first name, and there were probably dozens of Purvises in the Houston telephone directory.
I threw some clothes on and went out to get a cup of coffee. When I came back it was hours before I got to sleep. It wasn’t the coffee, however; coffee never bothers me that way. I was thinking of Mrs. Cannon again, and of a hundred thousand dollars, and a lot of things were growing clearer in my mind as I tossed and turned on the sweaty sheet. I was finished, wasn’t I? Football was the only thing I knew or was any good at, and they’d taken that away from me. What was left? Coaching? High school character-building? Getting shoved around by Monday-morning quarterbacks for peanuts? The hell with that. Selling? Nuts. I liked violence and rough body contact and money and excitement and then money again, and I hated failure in the way you can hate it only if you grew up with it. I’d seen enough ineffectual futility by the time I was twelve to last me the rest of my life, and I was a pro making them put it on the line when I was a junior in high school. I was big and fast and I was good—and I knew it. They called me a cold-blooded savage and Whore Harlan and What’s-in-it-for-me Harlan, but they paid me. Not openly, and not the school itself, but I got it. In college I got more. So now it was all over. They’d stopped the train and put me off because some guy had crashed into me with a car. Maybe he’d even done it deliberately. I cursed and sat up in bed, groping for cigarettes in the hot darkness. I wanted to get my hands on something or somebody and have an accounting. He was dead and beyond reach. But she wasn’t, and maybe she was at the bottom of the whole thing. I thought of the way she looked in that picture, and of the money she or somebody had cheated me of. I lit a cigarette and stared coldly at the match as I blew it out. You should have done it to somebody else, baby, I thought; I don’t like having it done to me. . . .
In the morning, after I’d had some breakfast, I came back to the room and put in a call to Houston. In a moment a girl’s voice trilled, “Good-morning-Old-Colony-Life-Insurance-Company.”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Purvis,” I said.
“I beg your pardon. What was the name again?”
“Purvis.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s no one here by that name. Are you sure you have the right number?”
“Of course,” I said impatiently. “He’s an investigator. Works out of the Houston office. This is Houston, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. But we have no Mr. Purvis. Just a moment, please—”
I waited irritably. What was the matter with her? Didn’t she even know who worked there? She came back on. “Hello, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I just checked with one of the other girls who’s been here longer. There used to be a Mr. Purvis, but he left the company several months ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see—” It was a little fast, and it took me a moment to catch up. “Well, look,” I went on hurriedly, before she could hang up, “could you give me his last telephone number or address, off the old personnel records?”
“Just a minute, please.”
I dug up an old envelope and uncapped my pen. “Hello,” she said when she came back on. “This is four months old, but he might still be there.”
I wrote it down. “Thanks a million,” I said.
I hung up and lit a cigarette. So that’s the way it was. It explained a number of things, such as why the company was still pawing around in the mess months after they should have paid off on the policy. The company wasn’t. They’d probably paid long ago and written it off as closed, but Purvis had gone into business for himself. Blackmail, extortion—call it whatever you liked. Something had made him suspicious when he’d gone up there to investigate, while he was still on the payroll. Maybe he’d never reported any of it, and now he was getting ready to put the squeeze on somebody. He’d hoped to get a little more ammunition, so he’d come down to pump me again. I was just the chump in the middle. Maybe I should rent myself out as a battleground so they could go on walking back and forth across my face with their tug-of-war for the rest of my life. If Cannon had crashed me deliberately, somebody in that mess had short-changed me about fifty thousand dollars, the way I saw it, and it was about time I found out who it was. Purvis knew, so what better place to start? I reached for the telephone again and put in a call to the number the girl had given me.
There was no answer. “Shall I try again in about ten minutes?” the operator asked.
“Please,” I said.
There was still no answer then, and I came up with the same empty ringing when I tried twice more during the morning. Well, maybe he had another job; he wouldn’t be home perhaps until around five or six in the afternoon. I went out on the beach and tried to swim, but I was wild with impatience and kept thinking of Purvis. At a few minutes of six I came back to the room and tried the number again.
A man’s voice answered, a tired and irritable voice.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Purvis,” I said. “Is he there?”
“Mr. Who?” he rasped.
“Purvis. P-u-r-v-i-s. Does he live there?”
“Nah. Yah got the wrong nummer, mate. He moved away from here a long time ago.”
“Well, do you know where I can get hold of him? Did he leave a forwarding—?”
“Nah, nah. Got no idea where he is.”
He hung up.
I stood looking at the phone. What now? Get hold of a Houston directory and start calling all the Purvises until I found him? Not on toll charges, anyway; if I were going to do that I’d better go up there. And what if he lived in a boarding house? The phone wouldn’t even be listed under his name. Well, hell, I had to do something; sitting here wondering about it would drive me crazy. I grabbed my clothes and started dressing. Just as I was buttoning down the tabs on my shirt collar the telephone rang stridently. I reached it in one leap.
“Hello.”
“Harlan?”
My pulse quickened as I recognized the smooth, persuasive, wise-guy voice. “Oh, hello, is that you again?” I asked casually; “What is it now?”
“Been having any trouble trying to get hold of me?” he asked innocently.
“Trying to get hold of you? What the hell would I be trying to call you for?”
“Oh, I didn’t know,” he replied easily. “It just occurred to me that if you’d called Old Colony they would give you an address, but I’ve moved from there. But since you didn’t—”
He let it trail off almost derisively and I knew he was fully aware I had talked to the girl at Old Colony. He probably still had a pipeline in there. So now he’d got in touch with me again even though he knew I was wise to the fact he no longer worked there and that any investigating he was doing now was strictly off the record and probably for the purposes of blackmail. As a way of sounding me out, it was pretty smooth. I wouldn’t have tried to call him if I hadn’t been interested in the thing myself.
“Not bad,” I said.
‘He chuckled. “I didn’t think it would take you over twenty-four hours to decide that five grand settlement was a bag of peanuts you’d toss to a squirrel. You did recognize the babe, didn’t you? You covered pretty well with the picture, but you’d already given it away when I described her.”
“Well, it might be pretty hard to remember just where I saw her before,” I said. “You know how it is. Babes here. Babes there—”
“Oh, sure,” he replied. “I didn’t think it would be any cinch.”
“But you might know of some way of making it easier?”
“I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t. I’ve got a little proposition in mind, if you think you’d be interested.”
“I wouldn’t know until I’ve heard it, would I? Suppose you come down and we look into it.”
He hesitated. “I’m expecting a phone call; if I go out I might miss it. Would you mind coming up here?”
“No,” I said. “Give me your address.”
He told me and I wrote it down. “See you in a couple of hours,” I said, and hung up.