The Big Bite - By Charles Williams Page 0,4
little odd? I mean, her husband crashes into you and lays you up in the hospital for weeks and she doesn’t even bring you a bunch of violets. They established the fact the wreck was entirely Cannon’s fault, she didn’t know but what you might sue the estate for steen million dollars, and still she wouldn’t waste half an hour going out to the hospital to butter you up a little.”
“As I said, her lawyer did.”
“Not the same thing at all. This babe’s a looker.” He moved his hands again. He could say a lot of things with his hands. “A dish like that can pour more oil on the troubled waters in five minutes than a lawyer can in a month. And they know it. All of them.”
“Well, after all,” I said, “her husband was killed in the wreck—”
“She didn’t take to bed about it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He shrugged, “Nothing in particular. How long had you been out there at that cabin before the accident?”
“About six days, I think. Let’s see, I got there on Saturday, and it was the following Thursday night he creamed me. Why?”
“I just wondered. How’d you happen to be there, anyway? You don’t come from that part of the country.”
“I like to fish. Do about a month of it each spring when I’m not working at some off-season job. A lot of bass in that lake, and the cabin belongs to an old friend, a guy I knew in college.”
He nodded. “I see. Ever been there before this year?”
“Once. About three years ago. Just over the weekend.”
“And you never did meet the Cannons? I thought maybe—that is, he had a camp out there too, not far from your friend’s.”
“Well, you might say I met him,” I said wearily. “Or have we mentioned that? But as far as I know I’ve never seen her in my life. I don’t even know what she looks like.”
“One of those very rich brunettes, blue-black hair, brown eyes, fairly tall, around thirty. Lovely woman. Not classic, but what they call striking. Coloration— you know what I mean.”
“Oh? Sure. I—” I started to say something else, but for some reason I bit it off and waited.
“If you’d ever seen her you’d remember her,” he went on. “Here, I’ve got a picture of her.” He took it out of the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to me. “What’d you say?”
I looked at it. “Nothing,” I said.
She was a dream, all right, and she was the same one. I was almost positive of that. The light had been pretty poor, there under the trees, but as he said himself if you’d ever seen her once you’d remember her.
“Well?” he asked.
It was just a hunch, but I played it. “Toothsome,” I said. “But I never saw her before.”
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