The Big Bite Read Free Page A

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