The Big Bite

3
I had to wait for a bus, so it was after nine when I arrived in Houston. The night was still and darkly overcast above the lights of the city, and a scattering of fat raindrops splashed against the walk as I came out of the bus station to hail a cab. I read off the address Purvis had given me. The ride took about ten minutes; I sat impatiently on the edge of the seat, smoking and trying to think. I had no plan of action and wasn’t sure of anything except that this time Purvis was going to do some talking himself. He was committed now; it was understood he knew something specific about what had happened that night, and he’d put a few facts on the line or wish he had.
It was a narrow street in an older section given over to second-hand stores and hole-in-the-wall markets and a few old apartment buildings. The driver pulled up before a three-story brick with a small vestibule in which a light was burning. I got out and paid him. The street was deserted except for two men talking beneath a bar sign down at the other end of the block. Purvis’s apartment was on the third floor. I pressed the buzzer. In a moment the door clicked and I went in.
It was a walk-up. I went up two steps at a time, meeting no one in the halls or on the stairs, but hearing snatches of what sounded like the same television program on all three floors. Number 303 was the first one on the right at the head of the stairs. I touched the bell and Purvis opened the door almost immediately. He nodded, but said nothing until I had come inside and the door was closed.
It was a small living-room. Directly across from the door was a window which presumably looked out on the street, but the blind was drawn all the way down. At the left was an open door going into the bedroom, while on the right, just opposite it, another opened into a small dinette. The living-room was fitted with the usual landlord-tan wallpaper and the beat-up odds and ends of shabby furniture that would come with a furnished deadfall in this neighborhood, so dreary and like a thousand others that Purvis’s things stood out and hit you right in the eye the moment you walked in. There were five or six framed copies of paintings of girls in ballet costumes, the same pictures you sometimes see in the anterooms of doctors’ offices. Some arty, horse-faced girl I got stuck with once at a party told me who the painter was that did them, but I couldn’t remember now. Dago was all I could think of, but that wasn’t it. There were some more pictures in one big frame over a desk at the right, beside the doorway going into the dinette, but these were photographs. They were all signed, and they were, all of ballet dancers. There must have been a dozen of them. An aficionado, I thought, remembering that way he had of describing things with his hands and what he had said about motion. In a corner across the room near the window was a high-fidelity sound system that blended into the other furnishings like a thousand-dollar bill among the nickels on a Salvation Army tambourine. It was playing something longhair.
“Sit down, Harlan,” he said, nodding to the old sofa at my left. He went over and turned off the music, and then folded his lank frame into a chair near the desk. “Les Sylphides,” he murmured.
“Meyer,” I said.
His eyebrows raised. “How’s that?”
“A gag,” I said. “Skip it. You had something to tell me.”
He was dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a dark sports shirt with long sleeves. It was hot in the room in spite of the little fan whirring away on top of the desk, but he didn’t sweat. The cynical, young-old face was fine-boned and pale and very tired, but that deadly efficiency was still there in the eyes. There wasn’t much to him inside the clothes; you felt that if you put a hand on his chest and pushed he’d fold up around your arm like a wet towel. He lit a cigarette and regarded me through the smoke.
“Her husband crashed you deliberately,” he said casually. “But I suppose you know that by now.”
“Yes,” I said. “Or maybe I was just supposed to be a by-product. He could have been trying to kill her.”
“Both of you, I think.”
I remembered what she had done when I saw her out there by the lake and knew he was probably right, but I didn’t say anything. He was going to do the talking this time.
“What was it tipped you in the first place?” I asked. “There’s nothing suspicious about a guy being found dead in a bad car smash-up.”
He shrugged. “Be corny, and call it a sixth sense. I don’t know what it is, but you get it after a while if you keep going to these things long enough. You pull a hundred packages out of the file and they’re all just about alike, but one of ‘em will start you ringing like a burglar alarm. The first thing was the way his head was pushed in—”
“Well,” I interrupted, “he did roll a car at sixty-five miles an hour. He figured to get bruised a little—”
“Sure,” he said. “But when reliable witnesses got there he was still under the wheel. He had four broken ribs to prove it. His skull had been crushed by some terrific blow, and the wound was a little to the rear and slightly to the right of the top of his head. So what did he hit it on? The dash? That was in his lap. Granted the top of the car was caved in until it was practically sitting on his haircut, but what he was hit with wasn’t flat—”
“Freaks happen all the time in bad wrecks. Nobody’s ever explained just how you can get knocked out of a pair of shoes that are laced up tight, but it’s been done.”
He nodded. “That’s right. But there were too many freaks in this one. For one thing, he wasn’t drunk. At least, not nearly as drunk as everybody thought. So the only other alternative theory is that he deliberately tried to kill you. And if the people he really meant to kill were still out there at the lake—” He stopped and gave me a cold grin. “That’s where you saw her, of course. Anyway, if they were still out there, which way would they have to go to get back to town?”
“Right past where we crashed,” I said.
He spread his hands. “You see?”
“What makes you so sure he wasn’t drunk?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t think he was that drunk. Nobody ever established it. No laboratory tests were made. Look at it this way. He was a prominent citizen; he was dead; there was a smell of alcohol about his body, and a pint bottle, about one-third full, in the glove compartment of the car—which didn’t break, incidentally, because the highway maps and papers in it cushioned the shock of the crash. But still the real reason he was assumed to be blotto, drunk was the fact that only a blotto drunk would have cut in like that. You see? They just reversed cause and effect, and didn’t even bother to look for any other explanation.”
“Why didn’t they make the lab tests?” I asked.
“To prove what? Liability for the accident? It was his, from start to finish. They told you that as soon as you came around. The skid marks and the positions of the cars proved that, and what you told them only confirmed it. And what’s the percentage in building a drunk-driving case against a dead man? You going to take him to court?”
“What about your outfit?”
“What difference did proof of drunkenness make to us? He was dead. We had to pay off on his life insurance, whether he was crocked or sober. By the time I got up there it would have been impossible, anyway. They'd already buried him. I was just making a routine investigation, until I began to see there could have been another reason for his driving you off the road. I backtracked down the, highway until I found the place he bought the bottle—”
“The same one? How do you know?”
He shrugged wearily. “Jesus. I don’t know. All that’s certain is that it was a pint, and that it was the same brand. Sure, he could have had three more in the meantime and thrown the bottles out. But in the insurance business you get in the habit of playing the percentages, and the percentages say that was the same bottle. He appeared to be sober when he bought it, and I doubt very much that two-thirds of it would have made him so drunk he couldn’t see something as big as a Buick convertible. Now, can we drop that for the moment?”
“Sure.” I said. “Go on.”
He leaned back in his chair and studied me thoughtfully. “I gather from the fact you’re here you might be interested in renegotiating your settlement with Mrs. Cannon?”
"Right," I said.
“It’ll be a little extra-legal, if you follow me.”
“So it’s extra-legal. It’s money. Did she collect the insurance?”
He nodded. “And she’s loaded, besides. Cannon left an estate that’ll add up to somewhere around three hundred thousand, after taxes. No other heirs.”
I leaned forward on the sofa. “All right. Go on.”
“Say a hundred grand. Split seventy-five, twenty-five.”
“Seventy-five for me?”
He shook his head with a pained kind of smile on his face. “Seventy-five for me, chum.”
“Back off and look again,” I said. “The wind’s whistling through your head.”
“How’s that?”
“Who got run over out there that night? You, or me?”
He shrugged. “That doesn’t enter into it. Who dug up the evidence, after everybody else had sloughed it off as a traffic fatality?”
“You’ve got more?”
“More what?”
“Evidence.”
“Some,” he said. “But maybe not quite enough. That’s where you come in.”
“Where I come in is when somebody says sixty grand. That’s my cue line.”
He sighed. “Fifty.”
I knew that was what he’d planned on from the first. Try to chisel me, would he?
“Sixty,” I said. “Take it or leave it. You wouldn’t have called me in if you hadn’t needed me.”
“I need you like I need the gon. It just happens you’re in a very good position to put on the pressure. It’s a psychological twist that’d make it easy, but I can do it alone if I have to.”
I grinned at him very coldly. “Then do it alone.”
“You think I can’t?”
”That’s right. You need somebody who was right there when he was murdered and who might or might not have been completely unconscious all the time under that other car. It’s a highly specialized field, and not many applicants could qualify.”
He exhaled a lungful of smoke and watched it moodily. I knew I’d hit him where it hurt. “Well, let’s table that discussion for the moment,” he said. “How about a cold beer?”
“Sure,” I said. I had him on the run now and all I had to do was keep the heat on him. Let him drop his guard and then jump him again. And I’d let him have it, but good.
We went out through the door at the right. It led into the dinette and kitchen, which were divided by the refrigerator and a serving bar about chest high. You had to go around the end of the bar to reach the refrigerator, which opened from the kitchen side. He flicked on the light. The kitchen part was just a cubbyhole with a sink and a two-burner gas stove next to the wall. You couldn’t see into the living-room from here. He opened the reefer and took out two bottles of imported beer. I think it was Danish. He uncapped them and set them on the drainboard of the sink. There was no window, and it was very hot under the light.
“You had more to go on than what you’ve told me so far, didn’t you?” I asked casually. “I mean, beside that hole in his head and the fact he wasn’t drunk.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You must have.”
He stared at me very coolly. “So? So maybe there is more.”
“Such as?” I asked. Now was as good a time as any.
“Such as nothing, at the moment.”
I reached out with my left and caught the front of his shirt. Pulling him to me, I gave him the open right hand across the side of the face. “Let’s have it now,” I said. It was a mistake.
There was no resistance in him at all. He came right on up against me like a couple of old inner tubes hanging off my arm, and when he got there he exploded. I had Purvis all over me. Fragments of flying Purvis hit me in the solar plexus and Adam’s apple at the same time, and then something chopped me just under the left ear and I was through. I didn’t even fall; he eased me to the floor like somebody putting down an old mattress he’d been carrying around. I was sick and I couldn’t get my breath. My whole body felt paralyzed. I tried to turn over. It was no use.
A convention of Purvises stood in a circle, looking down at me. “I wouldn’t try that again,” they said, all speaking at once. They sounded a long way off.
I retched and gagged, trying to get air through my throat again. The kitchen tilted and went on spinning slowly like a carousel. I opened my mouth and tried to bite a mouthful of air before I died of suffocation. Just before the room went completely black I started breathing again, but I still couldn’t move.
There was a sound somewhere like that of a buzzer, and I thought it was just another of the ringing noises in my head until he stepped over me and started around the serving bar. “Don’t go away,” he said, and flicked off the light. I lay in darkness and in agony.
If I could hit him just once I’d break him in two. The next time I’d have better sense than to pull him toward me. I’d take him apart. But I had to get up first. I tried again, and this time I managed to roll over. Sweat ran off my face and I had to fight against vomiting on the floor. I heard a door chime and then the door opening, and voices. The door closed. Purvis had company. It was a man. I could hear snatches of what he was saying.
“Federal radio inspector . . . complaints of television interference . . . amateur transmitter in the neighborhood . . .”
“No, I haven’t got a television set,” Purvis said.
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
“Not at—” Purvis began. His voice cut off with a shaky inward sucking of breath as if he had started to pull it in to scream, and then I heard the impact itself as if somebody had hurled a green watermelon against the wall. It was sickening. I froze up tight, forgetting my pain, and waited. Something slid softly to the floor, as if being helped, the way Purvis had eased me down. Then nothing happened at all. There was no sound. I slowly exhaled, beginning to feel the pain in my throat again. He moved. I heard footsteps coming toward the dinette. Something blocked off the light coming in from the living-room, and I knew he was standing in the doorway. He seemed to fill it. I couldn’t see him, because I was lying behind the serving bar and refrigerator. I waited, sweating with suspense. Would he come on in and look around into the kitchen side? I was helpless; he’d kick my head in like someone killing a snake. He stood there for a moment, and then I heard him turn and go away. It sounded as if he was going into the bedroom. He came out again and I heard the desk drawer being pulled open. There was a rustling of papers. I tried to breathe quietly, but air seemed to gasp and hiss through the agony in my throat like steam through old radiator pipes.
I could move a little now, and managed to push myself up to my hands and knees. If he did come out here and find me I wanted at least to be on my feet. I heard him shut the desk drawer and then the sound of his footsteps again. They appeared to be going toward the front door. He was leaving. I crawled silently around the end of the bar and came forward until I could see most of the living-room. Purvis’s feet and legs were in view, near the sofa. I slipped along the linoleum another two or three feet and peered around the edge of the doorway. He was standing in the front door. I saw his feet and legs first and then my glance went on up, and up. He was as big as a house. His back was turned toward me as he peered out into the hall, and he seemed to fill the doorway. He was bareheaded, and his hair was dark and brush-cut. He went out softly, pulling the door shut. I never had seen his face. I sighed weakly and pushed myself to my feet. I had to hold onto the refrigerator. My clothes were soaked with sweat.
I didn’t know whether I’d ever be able to speak again. My throat felt as if I had a logging chain doubled around it with a tractor pulling on each end. I wheezed as I staggered into the living-room and stood looking down at Purvis. He lay on his back with his eyes open, staring blankly up at the ceiling. His left forearm was broken, bent grotesquely across the rug as if he had another elbow inside the dark blue sleeve. He’d shoved it up instinctively, in that last thousandth of a second he was alive, trying to ward off the blow, and the impact had been so terrible it had broken it and then had enough power left over to make that kind of a mess of his head. I looked around to see what he had been hit with. There was nothing. The big guy must have brought it with him and then taken it away.
The whole thing had happened so suddenly I was having a little trouble catching up. The only thing I was sure of was that I had to get out of there, and fast. I was still groggy from that judo manhandling Purvis had given me, but this didn’t look like the safest place in the world to lie around and recover. Somebody else might come up. I’d have a sweet time explaining what I was doing here alone in the apartment with a man who was spilling the contents of his head onto a threadbare rug. “I was just sitting in the kitchen having a beer, officer. Sure, I heard this guy kill him, but I didn’t think anything about it; you know how it is, just figured it was some friend of his . . .” Cut it out, I thought. Get the hell out of here.
I walked softly to the door and had sense enough to take my handkerchief in my hand as I turned the knob. I looked out. The corridor was deserted. Slipping out, I transferred the handkerchief to the outer knob, turned it, and silently closed the door. I put the handkerchief back in my pocket and went down the stairs. The hallway on the second floor was empty. I could hear snatches of a television program and someone laughing. Then I was out in the street, weak and shaking a little as I turned the corner and went on. Nobody had seen me. But what about that taxi driver? I thought uneasily. He’d remember bringing me here. He’d recall he picked me up at the bus station. But, hell, he’d never actually looked at me. He couldn’t describe me, except to say that I was pretty big. It didn’t mean anything.
I started walking. It was a block before I met anyone, and then it was a colored girl who went on past without looking at me. When she was gone and I was alone again I felt my throat and tried to say something. I made a croaking noise. I cleared it painfully and tried again. “Mrs. Cannon,” I said hoarsely. It sounded like gravel being forced through a pipe. “Rich bitch. Testing. Rich bitch.” My voice cleared up slightly, but I wondered if I wasn’t still a little punchy.
When I was out of the area, a good ten blocks away, I ducked into a dimly lit bar where a jukebox was wailing and ordered a bottle of beer. Sitting on a stool between a big blonde who was yakking six thousand feet to the mile to her escort and a pint-sized redhead who was crocked to the eyeballs and singing something under her breath, I sipped the beer and tried to sort it, out. If that taxi driver remembered me, or if the police happened to think of looking into Purvis’s long-distance calls, I was in a bad spot. I hadn’t been seen leaving the building, but maybe the other guy had. We were about the same size, and the cops could probably make out with whichever of us they caught first. But assume I never was even connected with it? What next? Where did I go from here? Purvis was dead; I’d never find out anything from him now. Was I going to have to give it up, just because some big ox had knocked his roof in?
Who was the big joker, anyway? Purvis had obviously gone into the shakedown racket on a full-time basis, so maybe the guy was one of his victims or intended victims—but in that case, why hadn’t Purvis recognized him? Wouldn’t he know him? He obviously hadn’t, because he’d been sucked out of position by that wheeze about investigating complaints of something lousing up television reception in the neighborhood. He hadn’t been expecting trouble, because if he had the guy wouldn’t have been able to hit him with a handful of rice. I knew that from what had happened to me. He could move faster than any human being I’d ever seen in my life. But maybe that big guy was a little fast too. He’d probably had the pipe or loaded club up his sleeve. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to tangle with him in a dark alley. He was about my size, and if he could match speed with Purvis— I stopped.
I’d had to say it twice before it soaked in. I got it now, and it all matched perfectly. I was in business, if I didn’t let him get behind me with that piece of pipe.