The Big Bite Read Free

dreamed.”
    He nodded. “But there is a chance you did hear him? Remember, you’ve told me twice, just the same way.”
    “Sure,” I said. “But what of it? What difference does it make if he did groan or something?”
    “You see the pictures of his head?”
    “I didn’t want to see any pictures of his head. I had pictures of my own.”
    “I thought not,” he said. “I saw them. He didn’t make any noise, believe me.”
    “Then I must have imagined it.”
    He grunted. “Maybe.”
    I got it then, but before I could say anything he abruptly changed the subject. “You ever meet his wife? Widow, I mean.”
    “No.”
    “She never did come to see you in the hospital?”
    “No. Her lawyer, and the insurance joker. That’s all.”
    He looked thoughtful. “Did that ever strike you as a 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