The Big Bite (7 page)

Then I saw two windows, and knew I was worse off than ever. Looking out through that filmy drape, I could see a little of the two wings of the house that formed the sides of the U plan. On both sides there were windows, smaller ones, looking out over the patio. They were the casement type. I’d never tried it, but I knew they couldn’t be opened from outside except by stripping and wrecking the gear and crank mechanism that operated them. It was a worm type gear, which can be driven from only one end. They’d all be the same. Windows were out; it had to be a door.

Suddenly I was conscious she was saying something. I “Oh?” I asked. “I beg your pardon?”

She smiled. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure,” I said. “Uh-thanks.”

“Geraldine!” she called.

There was no answer. She looked at me and lifted her shoulders with a graceful shrugging motion, spreading her hands. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”

“Surely,” I said. I stood up. She went out toward the dining-room. I watched the rear of those bullfighter pants out of sight, and then turned, and while I was still turning and saying,
“Holy
hell!” very softly under my breath I saw the answer to the thing I was looking for. It was a glass door opening onto the patio. I’d been looking at it all the time but hadn’t noticed because it was behind that semi-transparent drape. I was just to the left of the end of the big picture window and I’d thought it was a part of it. The drape had been made wide enough to cover the door in addition to the window when it was closed, apparently so as to give an unbroken line clear across that side of the room.

I could hear her talking to Esmerelda or whatever her name was out in the kitchen. I stepped swiftly across to the door and pulled back the end of the drape. Opening it, I tried the knob from the outside. It didn’t turn; the night latch was on. Looking quickly around to be sure I was still alone, I reversed the push-button plungers in the edge of the door to unlatch it, closed it softly, and let the drape fall back in position. The door apparently wasn’t used much, so the chances were she didn’t bother to check it every night.

I walked back and sat down. In a moment she came in from the dining-room with two cups of coffee and some cream and sugar on a tray. I did some more of the earnest young man about how sorry I was for the accident, even if it wasn’t my fault, and while I talked I tried to keep my eyes off her long enough to get the exact layout of that patio. She regretted some more that I was washed up in football. I shoved the silken weight of her off the edge of my mind and told her how brave she was. She told me I was nice and that it was considerate of me to call this way, and I knew she was just waiting for me to get the hell out of here so she could call Tallant. They were going to have one hot conference about this, but I thought I had her fooled. l was just a goof who’d come back to go fishing. I wondered if the maid slept in, and decided she probably didn’t. They’d had to stay under cover all this time, so Tallant was probably coming here late at night. They were too cagey to be seen together for probably another six months, even with Purvis out of the way. So that’s the way it was. She’d be waiting for him—waiting—
Damn it,
I thought.
Cut it out, and attend to business. Get that look off your pan; don’t think she won’t recognize it—she’s
been seeing it since she was twelve. Be sorry about something.

About what?

Hell, anything.

”Are you going to be here very long, Mr. Harlan?” ‘she asked. “Two weeks,” I replied. “Maybe a little less.”

“And you’re out at that same cabin where you were before?”

“I will be,” I said. “Right now I’m at the Enders Hotel. The friend of mine that owns the shack is mailing me a key. It’ll probably be here today.”

“Well, I do hope I’ll see you again while you’re here,” she said.

I stood up on cue. “It’s been nice meeting you,” I said earnestly. “I probably won’t come to town much, but if you’re out that way drop in and go fishing with me. Heh, heh.”

She smiled, the way you would at a meat-head who wasn’t too bright, and came to the door with me. She held out her hand very graciously. I took it. The brown eyes looked up at me from about the level of my shoulder.
Brother!
I thought. I simpered like a clown and said good-by three times, standing on one foot; then the other, gave her another poor-but-honest pitch about how nice it was of her to let me call, and finally backed out the door like a high school kid escaping from the stage after winning a scholarship in the essay contest. She’d call Tallant all right the minute the door was closed, but they’d just have a good laugh. was utterly harmless.

I drove on around the corner and down the hill, casing the terrain, and went back to the hotel. I parked car behind it and went shopping. I bought a small pencil flashlight in a drugstore, and in Woolworth’s picked up a three-way outlet plug for a wall receptacle, some typewriter paper, a pad of yellow second sheets and a few sheets of carbon paper. What else? I already had the cardboard box. Oh, yes. Wrapping paper twine, and some address stickers.

I walked back to the hotel, avoiding the south side of the square and keeping a lookout for Tallant. I didn’t see him anywhere.

It was almost noon now; blazing sunlight fell straight into the square, and it was very hot inside the room. I put down all the stuff I’d bought, turned on the fan, and lit a cigarette. The minute I stopped moving and planning I started thinking about her again. I could see the sleeping devil inside those cool brown eyes and that slender figure packed into those bullfighter pants and the way she moved. I became uncomfortable, and cursed her, trying to drive her out of my mind. The hell with Mrs. Cannon. Stick to business. There’d be plenty of that later. With a hundred thousand dollars I’d be using types like Mrs. Cannon to strike matches on.

I pushed her off me and got back on the track. Now. The typewriter was down in the car, the recorder was up here, and for the next two moves I had to switch them. But I didn’t want to go lugging stuff back and forth past that desk down there like an ant at a picnic; there was no use starting people wondering what I was doing. I was supposed to be on my way to a fishing camp. Then why not go on out there now? But maybe the key hadn’t arrived. Everything had broken so smoothly and so fast I was way ahead of schedule. Still, it could be. If George had mailed it yesterday—

Well, hell, one way of finding out would be to go around there and ask. I went down in the street again and one of the locals told me how to find the post-office. It was on a side street north of the square.

“Harlan?” The man at the General Delivery window looked in his pigeonholes and shook his head at me, “Nothing today.”

“Any more mail coming in from the west in the next few hours?” I asked. “From Fort Worth?”

“Putting up some now,” he said. “Try in half an hour.”

I went over to the coffee shop that’s across the street from every Federal office building in the country and ordered a coke. There was a wire rack near the entrance with a stack of
Houston Posts
on it. I grabbed one off and shuffled through it while I drank the coke. Purvis was there, near the bottom of the second page but it was about the same story as last night with no new developments. Then I remembered this was the out-of-town edition and probably went to press about the time I left Houston last evening. It was still hard to realize I’d accomplished so much in such a short time. God, this time tomorrow— Easy, pal, easy. It’s long time till tomorrow, and a thousand things could happen.

A whistle blew somewhere and it was twelve o’clock. The coffee shop began to fill up with government stenographer types, Honey Chile division, wearing cotton prints and ordering lettuce and tomato sandwiches. I ordered a sandwich myself but got to thinking of Mrs. Cannon and choked on it. I paid the check, went back across the street, and stooged around the postoffice for another ten minutes, looking at the mug-shots of the wanted men stuck up on the wall next to last year duck hunting regulations. Then suddenly while I was staring at them and thinking of what some psychology prof had told a class of us in college about there being no such thing as a criminal type of face, a little chill ran up my back. I was breaking the law, and they could blow the whistle on me. But, hell, who’d tell them? Mrs. Cannon? She’d go to the chair just to get me sent up for a couple of years? That was a yak. But still—

I shrugged it off impatiently. What the hell, it wouldn’t be the Federals, anyway. It was nothing to them. Then I stopped suddenly. Wasn’t it? The way I had it planned I had to send something through the I mail, didn’t I? The fact I was sending it in the other direction and to nobody in particular didn’t make any difference; I was still using Uncle Sugar’s mails for something illegal and there was hardly anything that’d cause him any quicker to take a good, long look down your throat. No, I’d have to fake that part. Uncle I’d just as soon leave alone.

Well, that could be done easily enough, I thought. All I had to do was mail something else, something legitimate that looked like the same package. No sweat there.

I went back to the General Delivery window again. This time the key was there. It was stuck to a piece of cardboard with Scotch tape and mailed in a brown Manila envelope. On the way back to the hotel I went past a hardware store that had a display of sporting goods in the window. One of the items was a big card full of cork-bodied bass bugs, the kind you use with a flyrod. I went in and bought six of them. George would appreciate them, and I had to mail something to somebody.

I packed everything, checked out of the hotel, and loaded the car. On the way out of town I stopped at a small grocery store and bought some eggs, bacon, bread, and coffee. The road going out toward the lake ran south from the square, a little-traveled secondary road that connected with an east-west highway about thirty miles beyond at a town named Breward. Some people contended it was a short cut in coming up from Houston, or had been until they’d widened and speeded-up the other highway, and that Cannon had been coming from Houston when he’d hit me. He’d been down there on a business trip. Purvis, apparently, had found put he had come into town on the main highway and then gone out to the lake. How, I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter now because I was using a different approach to the matter of proving the whole thing.

It was a narrow blacktop pavement not too well kept up, winding over rolling, red clay hills with rural mailboxes here and there and ramshackle farmhouses sitting back from the road behind them. The road shimmered with heat and the fields looked withered and brown as if it hadn’t rained for a long time. Eight miles out I came down into the river bottom where he had wrecked me. The road went straight across on a long fill about six feet high. I crossed the bridge over the river first, steel girders with wooden planking that rattled under the tires. About two hundred yards beyond it was the concrete culvert where he had crashed. There were no other cars in sight. I slowed, looking at it.

They had repaired the place where he’d knocked a chunk off the wing of the culvert, and the weeds and shredded bushes were beginning to grow back again. I looked ahead to where I had spun in myself. The scars were still visible on the side of the fill where the wrecker had dragged the Buick back onto the road. It wasn’t as far from Cannon’s car as I had thought. I’d said a hundred yards, but I could see now it was considerably less, not much more than a good booming punt. Call it sixty. Mrs. Cannon and Tallant were bound to have seen it; it hadn’t gone any further off the road than Cannon’s had. So they must have come back to have a look at me and be sure I was unconscious or dead before they slugged him. Maybe they’d even checked again, before they shoved off, to make certain I was still out. A little chill chased itself up my back. Suppose I’d come around about that time and said something to them, or groaned. I’d have probably got the same treatment. These two characters played a rough brand of ball, and they made up their own rules as they went along. I thought of what I had to do tonight and tomorrow morning. For a little while it was going to be like juggling dynamite caps, and if I didn’t have control of the situation every second it could blow up right in my face.

I drove on. The road in to the lake turned off to the right about two miles ahead. An arrow-shaped sign that read
Pete’s Live Bait Skiffs,
had fallen down and was propped against a stump in some dead grass. The road itself was just a pair of ruts wandering over a sandhill through some cut-over pine. A mile or so ahead there were some fields and an abandoned farmhouse, and then it dropped back into the river bottom again. The air was a little cooler under the big timber, but the sloughs were mostly dried up now in late summer and the mud had dried and cracked in geometric patterns. In about fifteen minutes I came to a fork in the road with Pete’s sign pointing to the left. I’d never been down there, and presumably the Cannon camp was in that direction. The other fork was just a dim trace. It went nowhere except to George’s camp, around the upper end of another narrow arm of the lake.

In another few minutes I came abruptly into the clearing. The gray, weather-beaten little two-room shack with its shake roof stood under a couple of big oaks near the water. Beyond it I could see the inlet extending straight ahead, the water flat and glaring in the sun like a sheet metal between the dark walls of timber. I stopped the car in the shade before the front porch and got out. It was intensely silent; there was a feeling of isolation about the place as if it were a thousand miles to the nearest road instead of only six.

I unlocked the door and went in. Everything was just as I had left it. A deputy sheriff had come out am locked it after the wreck. The front room held a cook stove and a homemade pine table covered with oil cloth. Cooking utensils hung from nails in the wall behind the stove and there were some shelves of staple groceries. I unlatched and opened the small window at each end of the room and went into the back one. It was a little larger and held two single beds and an army cot. Some more cots were folded and stacked in a corner and my two flyrods in their aluminum cases lay on one of the beds. Hunting and fishing clothes hung on nails all around the room. The trapped, dead air was stiflingly hot. I opened the windows, feeling my shirt sticking to me with sweat.

I looked at my watch. It was a little after two. Leaving the recorder in the car, I brought in the bags and the typewriter. Putting the bags in the back room, I set the typewriter on the table in the front and took the cover off. I opened one of the bags and got out the yellow typing paper and carbons. Then I remembered I hadn’t bought an eraser. Must have had a lot of confidence in myself, I thought sourly; I hadn’t used a typewriter since I’d got out of college. I scouted around the cabin and finally scared up the stub of a pencil that had a little eraser left on the end of it.

It was still intensely hot in the cabin and I was thirsty. I stripped off my shirt and slacks, hung them draped over hangers on the front porch so the perspiration would dry, took the water pail, and walked up the trail to the spring in my shorts. I dipped up a pail full with the small aluminum saucepan hanging from a nail driven into a sweetgum tree beside the spring, took a good, long drink of it, and came back.

I arranged the paper beside the typewriter, got a pad of cigarettes and some matches out of one of the bags, and located an ash tray. I dragged up a chair and sat down before the typewriter. It was deathly silent. I had this whole end of the world to myself and I was about to put down on paper the highest-priced short piece of prose ever written. I grinned. All it took to be a successful writer was a guaranteed audience; Hitler had proved that.

Never mind the gags,
I thought impatiently;
get to work
. I rolled a sheet of the yellow paper into the machine for a rough first draft and began. I made a lot of mistakes at first because I wasn’t familiar with the machine and hadn’t used one for a long time. I didn’t like the way it began, and after I’d wadded it up I didn’t like the next version either. The pile of discarded yellow pages grew higher on the floor beside me. Sweat ran down my body and I got a towel to mop it off. It was an hour and a half before I had it all down the way I wanted, a little more than a full page, single spaced.

I read it over:

To the District Attorneys at Houston, Texas, and “Wayles, Texas,
it began.

My name is John Gallagher Harlan. I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, July 10th, 1927, the son of Patrick and Marianne Harlan, both now deceased. I am a graduate of ____________ University, class of 1949, and former professional football player. I am six feet, three inches tall, and weigh two hundred and thirty pounds. There is a hirsute mole under my left shoulder-blade, and considerable scar tissue around and below my left knee. An examination of the bones of my left leg will show it was badly broken in two places, not very long ago. The bridgework, the result of teeth lost in football scrimmages, was done by Paul J. Scarff, DDS, Medical-Dental Building, San Francisco, California.

The above data is unimportant except for purposes of possible identification and verification of the fact I actually existed, because if you receive this at all it will only be because I am dead. I will have been killed by Daniel R. Tallant and/or Mrs. Howard L. Cannon, both of Wayles, Texas.

I do not know whether you will be able to find my body, or, in the event that you do, whether you will ever be able to gather sufficient evidence to convict them, but this will assist you to the extent of explaining their motive. I was killed to prevent my disclosure of the following information:

Both Mrs. Cannon and Mr. Tallant are already guilty of murder. Mrs. Cannon’s husband did not die as the result of an automobile accident on the night of March 4th, 1956, as was believed, but was bludgeoned to death by Mr. Tallant, with Mrs. Cannon’s connivance and/or assistance, shortly afterward as he lay unconscious in the wreckage of his car. I was present at the time, pinned under the side of my own automobile some sixty yards away. I heard voices, followed by the sound of a blow, but feigned unconsciousness to keep from being killed myself.

I went on to explain how I had seen her out there near the lake a few minutes before and how Cannon had driven me off the road because he believed I was Tallant and that she was in the car with me.

I wound it up:

This will also clear up the death of Mr. Wilton L. Purvis of 10325 Caroline Street, Houston, Texas, on the night of August 8, 1956. He was attempting to blackmail the aforesaid two murderers
on the strength of the evidence he had collected against them, and was himself killed by a single powerful blow on the head delivered by Mr. Tallant. I was present in the apartment at the time, in the kitchen where I could not be seen from the living-room or the doorway to the dining-room. Mr. Tallant gained access to the Purvis apartment by posing as a Federal radio inspector investigating complaints of neighborhood television interference. In corroboration of the fact that I was there, I offer the following: Mr. Purvis was wearing a dark blue sports shirt and gray flannel slacks. His left arm was broken by the blow. There were two bottles of imported beer on the drainboard in the kitchen, opened but untouched.