The Big Bite (6 page)

I lit a cigarette, smoked it out to the end, and fired up another. Time went on. Sunlight was hitting the big plate glass window of the Cannon Motors showroom on the west side of the square now. A few cars were beginning to slide into the rows of angle parking spaces. I studied the drivers carefully as they got out and fished in their pockets for nickels for the meter and if they were big men I put the glasses on them. None of them resembled him at all. If they were tall enough they were thin, or if heavily built they were shorter or had sandy hair or long hair or damned little hair of any kind.

I was growing uncomfortable. I shifted around, trying to stretch my legs. The gimp one ached a little; I looked at the scar tissue around the knee and cursed under my breath. The meat-headed, punchdrunk bastard— Who? Cannon? Mrs. Cannon? Or this big goon I thought I was looking for? I must have gravel in I head. What did I think I was proving with this Grade B movie routine? Just because some big guy had killed Purvis I’d strung together a chain of improbable coincidences and come up with a pearl necklace. What the hell—the chances were he’d never heard of Mrs. Cannon. He might be from Kokomo or Tucson, Arizona. He could be anybody. Maybe people were standing in line to kill Purvis. Maybe he’d won a contest, or something, to get first crack at him. Send in six new subscriptions and kill Purvis at our expense.

I grabbed suddenly for the glasses and trained them on the doorway of the Cannon Motors showroom. A girl had stopped there, her hand on the knob. It wasn’t Mrs. Cannon, however. This was a blonde. She was wearing a blue dress and white shoes, carrying a white handbag with long straps. She seemed to be waiting for somebody to open the door for her. I swung the glasses the way she was looking and sucked in my breath sharply, but then let it ease out again in disappointment. The man coming along the walk was the right size, but his hair was longer and it was the color of cotton. He unlocked the door and they went in. I watched her trip across the floor of the showroom and go into the office. She had nice legs.

Well, there'd be others working in the place. I turned the glasses oh it every few minutes, in the meantime keeping a sharp lookout over the nearer end of the square. Most of the stores were open now. More people were on the walks, and it was becoming more difficult to look them all over as they moved along.

My sweeping gaze stopped abruptly, and I came to sharp attention. What I had seen was a Chevrolet convertible coming along the street on the south side of the square. There was a man in it, a man who had wide shoulders and was bareheaded. His hair was dark, or so it seemed in the brief instant he was in view. I snatched at the glasses, but in the time I was putting them up to my eyes he swung into an alley and disappeared. I watched the mouth of the alley, very alert now. No one came out. He could have been the one, I thought. The convertible was significant. I waited while minutes dragged by, but there was no sign of him.

Maybe there was parking back there for employees of the stores along that side of the square. I studied the area. The alley was in the middle of the block, with the J. C. Penney store on one side of it and a shoe repair shop on the other. Adjoining the Penney store on the east, toward me, was a barbershop and then a small jewelry store. On the west side of the alley, beyond the shoe place, was a sporting goods store and next to that a dry-cleaners. I went up the line, glancing at the doorways. They were all open now except the dry-cleaning place and the sporting goods store. I couldn’t see anybody inside, however, except some girls in Penney’s. I swung back, watching the sidewalk. Then I stopped suddenly. The door of the sporting goods store was open now. Somebody must have come in from the rear. I grabbed the glasses and focused on it.

There was no one visible, but I could see for several feet back inside the doorway with every detail hard and clear. There was a showcase on the right and I could even make out the rows of bass plugs on a glass shelf inside it. The glasses shook a little. I steadied them on the window sill and looked again. Behind the showcase were some shelves of stock, among which I could make out boxes that probably contained reels and some flatter ones which looked like the type flylines came in. Nobody came in sight.

I muttered impatiently and looked away. I couldn’t waste all day on a wild guess; I had the rest of the square to cover. I gave it a good going-over and saw no likely-looking prospects. In a moment I was back staring at the front of the sporting goods store again. Something on the glass showcase caught my eye. It was rounded and black, and partly cut off by the door frame. I looked at it again and grunted softly to myself. It was the end of a telephone handset.

Well, I could eliminate this bird and quit worrying about him. Taking the glasses down, I looked at the sign above the door.
Tallant’s,
it said. I stood up and reached for the telephone book on the little stand in the corner. Looking up the number, I lifted the telephone down and got into position again with the glasses propped across the window sill. The phone cord was just long enough to reach.

“Would you get me 2279?” I said, when the man at the desk answered.

“Just a minute, please.”

I heard him dialing, and then the phone ringing at the other end. I waited, keeping the glasses zeroed in on the area above the showcase. He came into view and lifted the handset. He was a tall man with tremendous shoulders, and he had short-cropped dark hair. I exhaled softly.

“Hello. Tallant’s Sporting Goods,” he said.

It was an odd sensation, watching his lips move at the same time I was listening to his voice on the receiver.

“Hope you weren’t busy,” I said. “I just wondered if you had any reports on how the bass are hitting out at Swanson Lake.”

“Been pretty good the last few days, I hear,” he replied. “But mostly on live bait. Who’s calling?”

“You wouldn’t know me,” I said. “I just came up from Beaumont. A friend of mine down there said I could probably get a report on the lake at your place. George Tallant, I think he said. That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Dan
Tallant,” he corrected.

“Oh, sure. That’s right. So it’s been pretty good, huh?” I was staring intently, very excited now. He was the one, all right. I was almost positive of it, in spite of the fact he was leaning over the showcase, foreshortened, as he talked, and it was hard to fit him into the pose as I’d seen him before, erect and facing the other way.

He said something else, just as the idea hit me. “By the way,” I broke in, “you don’t happen to have a GBF torpedo-head flyline, do you? For a six-ounce rod—”

“No-o, I don’t, think so,” he replied. “I don’t carry much of a selection, because nearly everybody around here uses spinning gear. But just a minute; I’ll look—”

I saw him straighten and turn, looking at that section of stock right in back of the phone where I thought I had seen the flyline boxes. I got him dead to rights in the glasses, the same picture exactly as before, the height and the tremendous spread of shoulders, the small ears in close to the head, the short, crisp black hair, and that impression he was young and as strong as a fighting bull. There was no doubt of it at all. I was talking to the man who had killed Purvis.

When he had hung up he moved back to the rear of the store again and I couldn’t see him any more. I lowered the glasses, dropped the phone back on its cradle, and sat for a moment staring at it. Right into the end zone on the first play; this was better than I’d even dared hope for. I’d proved I was right, located him, and identified him—all in the first two or three hours. Improbable, was it? A dream? Hell, it was turning into reality faster than I could keep up with it.

All right, all right,
I warned myself,
don’t dislocate your shoulder patting yourself on the back.
There was plenty to do yet, and the tricky and dangerous part was just beginning. Mrs. Cannon was next. I stood up and went into the bathroom to shave. Here I come, you brown-eyed Fort Knox.

Nine-thirty was a little early to go calling on a woman, especially unannounced, but that’s the way it had to be. If I waited until later she might not be home, and if I phoned first I never would see her. I was the last person in the world she wanted to meet face to face. I grinned at my reflection in the mirror, a little coldly. That was all right. So maybe she wouldn’t like me. I was going to be a hell of a lot more unpopular with her in about twenty-four hours if things went off as scheduled.

I dressed in a fresh pair of gray-slacks and a subdued sports shirt, combed my hair, and took a last gander at myself in the mirror. I’d do. I looked as scrubbed and wholesome as a freshly-laundered moose, and about half as subtle. She’d never suspect me of anything.

I looked up her address in the telephone book. Three-twenty-four Cherrywood Drive, it said. Putting the binoculars in the bag with the gun, I locked it, and then checked the recorder to be sure its case was locked too. I went downstairs, did the how-you-feeling-now-much-better-thanks routine with the solicitous type at the desk, and on out the rear door to the car. Coming out of the alley, I turned north, avoiding the square. At the first filling station I pulled in and gassed up. The attendant told me how to find Cherrywood Drive.

It was southwest of the square, near the crest of a sloping hill overlooking the town. Near the bottom the bungalows had a housing-development look about them, but further up they were bigger, on large, landscaped lots. Cherrywood Drive was only four blocks long and there were just three houses in the last block, two. of them on the left, or downhill side. I slowed, looking at the numbers. The Cannon place would be the second one on the left, the last house on the street. It was near the corner where Cherrywood terminated in an intersecting street going downhill. Beyond the intersecting street was a wooded area, still undeveloped. I liked the whole layout but I didn’t want to take too much time now in looking it over. If I goofed around out here until she got a look at me out the window she probably wouldn’t be “in” when I rang the buzzer.

The other two houses were white Colonial types with columns and wide lawns and driveways. Directly across from the Cannon house was a vacant lot, grown up with pines, however, rather than weeds. I pulled the old Chevy to the curb on that side and walked across the street. The Cannon house was newer, a long, low ranch style built of light-colored brick with a sweeping, low-angled white roof covered with broken quartz. It looked very western and a little out of place among all these pines. It sat back from the street in a large expanse of well-tended lawn, but there was no circular drive. A flagstone walk bordered with some kind of low shrubs led to the front door, and beyond it a wide concrete driveway went straight back to the two-car garage adjoining the house on the far end. Both doors of the garage were closed. That should mean she was home.

It was hot now and I could feel perspiration beginning to break out on my face. I went quickly up the walk. A colored man in a straw hat was digging in the flower bed under the big picture window in front. His shirt was plastered to his back with sweat. Drapes were drawn across the window and I couldn’t see in.
Remember,
I told myself,
you’ve never seen her before in your life. Sell her on it.

I rang the bell. The gardener straightened and brushed his wet face with a hand, looking up at me. “You know if Mrs. Cannon’s home?” I asked.

“Yassuh, I think so,” he said. He went back to his work. I’d just started to reach for the bell again when the door opened. A young colored girl looked out at me indifferently. She was chewing gum and held a broom in her left hand.

“Is Mrs. Cannon in?” I asked.

“I’ll find out,” she said. “Who I say it is?”

“Mr. Warren,” I said, mumbling a little.

“Just a minute.”

She disappeared, leaving the door ajar. It opened into a small entry hall. There was a door at the left of that, going into the living-room apparently, but I couldn’t see much of it. I waited. Maybe I shouldn’t have said Warren, I thought. It might still sound too much like Harlan. O’Toole or Schutzbank or something would have done better. But still it had to be within shooting distance; I didn’t want her to get the idea I was aware I might have to pitch her a phony name to get in. That would ruin it all.
Oh, hell,
I thought;
it’s been five months and she doesn’t know I’m within two thousand miles.

The girl came back. Mrs. Cannon was in. I could wait in the parlor. I followed her in through the entry hall and stood in the living-room. “She’ll be heah in a minute,” she said, and went on out through a door at the right rear, which seemed to lead into the dining-room. As soon as she was gone, I looked swiftly around, trying to get as good a picture of the layout as I could before Mrs. Cannon got here.

Apparently there was no dog. That had been worrying me, but I didn’t see any signs of one. Certainly there wasn’t one in the house, or he’d have been around to investigate by this time, and I couldn’t see any kennel in the patio behind the house. There was another plate glass window at the rear of the living-room, fitted with a gauzy drape which was closed now but was fairly transparent with the bright sunlight behind it, The patio was enclosed with a white-painted cinder block wall about four feet high. Below it down the hillside was another wooded vacant lot. Approaching the house from the rear would be a cinch. Getting in, however, was going to be another matter.

I’d noticed something when I first stepped into the entry hall, but it hadn’t actually registered until now. The house was air-conditioned. I could feel the coolness penetrating my sweaty shirt. It was fine after the sticky heat outside, but there was another angle to it I didn’t like at all. The doors and windows would be tightly closed all the time it was turned on, so it wasn’t going to be merely a matter of unlatching a screen. It wasn’t good. I glanced swiftly around, studying the room.

It was a long one. At the far end was a raised fireplace with a copper hood. To the left of it was an open doorway which apparently led into a study or library because I could see rows of books along the wall and the front end of a mounted sailfish. At the right was the hallway which went on through to the rest of the house. Some chairs and a small sectional sofa were scattered about that end, before the fireplace, but the focal point of the room was nearer the center where a long custom-built sofa was backed up against the drapes of the front window. A coffee table and three large chairs faced it in a rough semicircle, and it was probable this was the part of the room generally used when only a few people were present because it faced the large rear window overlooking the patio. It looked good to me. At each end of the sofa there was a table with a big, red-shaded lamp on it. The lamp cords disappeared behind the sofa. I made a mental note I’d probably need a three-way outlet plug. There was a whispering sound like that of slippers on carpet. I turned just as Mrs. Cannon came into the room from the hallway.

When she saw me, she stopped. Her eyes widened a little, and I knew she recognized me. I didn’t care now, because I was in, and I was too busy anyway trying to keep from staring at her to worry about it.

Striking, Purvis had said. She was, but he hadn’t scratched the surface.

The other time had been just a flashing glimpse at dusk, and that photograph hadn’t amounted to much more than an inventory. She was wearing bullfighter’s pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up; the blue-black hair was cut rather short and it swirled carelessly about a slender oval face the color of honey or good pale vermouth. She was a construction job from the ground up without being overdone about it anywhere—just medium height and rather slim and with only a touch of that overblown calendar-girl effect above the sucked-in waist—but if you had to look twice to be sure that wasn’t Manolete inside those pants you were in bad shape and ought to see an optometrist or psychiatrist before you got any worse. The pants themselves were black and very smooth, and what they did to her thighs—or vice versa—should happen more often. Below them her legs were bare and honey-colored and she wore bullfighter’s slippers.
Break it up,
I thought;
in another two seconds you won’t know whether to say hello or charge
.

It was her eyes, however, that could throw the match in the gasoline. They were large and very lovely, fringed with long dark lashes, and they were brown—not soft or fawn-like, but self-possessed and cool with a hint of the devil in them, a devil not too well tied up and only half asleep. You had an impression that if she ever really turned them on you with that sidelong come-hither out of the corners and from under the lashes she could roll your shirt up your back like a window-blind. Mrs. Cannon was a large order of girl; she may have killed her husband, but I was willing to bet he’d never been bored when he was alive.

She recognized me; she was off guard for just an instant and I saw the sudden wariness in her eyes. Then she recovered and murmured politely, “Good morning, Mr.—ah—”

“Harlan,” I said. “John Harlan.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought Geraldine said a Mr. Warren. I couldn’t imagine— Won’t you sit down, Mr. Harlan?”

She flowed forward like warm honey poured out of a jug and took one of the big chairs facing the sofa. I remained standing until she was seated and then sat down on the sofa. She leaned forward to take a cigarette from the box on the coffee table. I sprang up again to light it for her. She looked up at me over the flame of the match, smiling a little, and said, “Thank you.”

I lit one for myself and sat down again. “I want to apologize for coming so early in the morning,” I said, “but I’m on my way out to the lake to go fishing and didn’t want to miss you.”

“That’s quite all right,” she replied smoothly. “I’ve been up for hours.”

I had to hand it to her; she was as cool as they come. I knew she was raging inside at that maid for not getting my name straight and at the same time she was probably going crazy trying to figure out—now that I had got in—whether I recognized her as the-woman I’d seen out there at the lake, but none of it showed on her face.

“You know, I expected somebody much older,” I said. “I don’t know where I got the impression, but I thought you’d be thirty or thirty-five.” It was an old gag, of course, and she’d recognize it as such, but still it was the truth in a way. Purvis’d said she was thirty, but she didn’t look it.

She gave me a faint smile and nodded. “You’re very flattering, Mr. Harlan,” she murmured. “And so early in the morning, too.”

I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could see that amused devil looking out of her eyes for just a second. It was beginning to appear to her that I didn’t know I’d ever seen her before, and the tension was easing: Two-hundred-and-thirty pounds of ham-handed athlete trying to be a smoothie probably tickled her, too. She’d heard all the compliments, by experts; and with those eyes, she’d probably been using men for throw-rugs since she was three. Well, that was all right. I’d be something new for her; I’d be the first one that ever cost her a hundred thousand dollars. She’d probably sleep with a lock of my hair under her pillow.

I pitched my voice down a little and looked at my hands. “I—uh—” I said. Then I glanced up at her, ill at ease and awkward, but sincere as hell, “There isn’t anything, really, that I can say, is there?” I asked.

“I don’t think there’s anything that
has
to be said,” she replied quietly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Well—it isn’t a question of blame,” I said haltingly, “It’s just that—well, there
was
a wreck, and I was involved in it. I wanted to come and see you after I got out of the hospital, but didn’t know what there was I could say if I did come. I knew how badly you were torn up about it, too, and realized you didn’t want to see me and be reminded of it—”

That ought to get her off the hook,
I thought,
so she could relax.
I was just a big simple muscle-head who didn’t have the faintest idea why she’d avoided me. There was nothing for her to be afraid of any more. All I had to do now was ease her mind as to why I’d come back here, and I’d be in.

It was as if we were working off the same script. “It’s quite all right,” she said. “I’m glad you came. And I’m very sorry I didn’t come to see you in the hospital, but it’s nice to know that you understood. However, I’ll admit I was a little surprised at seeing you now. I didn’t know you were back in this part of the country.”

“I came back to finish that fishing trip,” I explained. “Going to work on a new job in September. I won’t get a vacation for a year, so I thought I’d better do my fishing now while I could.”

The big eyes became very grave and sympathetic. This baby was good. “I was so very sorry to read that you had been—I mean, that you weren’t going to play any more. Do you think the accident had anything to do with it?”

I shrugged. No way to tell, actually. It was just one of those things.”

She ran the rheostats up a little and brushed my face with a lingering glance that would melt butter at fifteen-feet. “I hated to hear it,” she said simply.

Not half as much as you’re going to hate it this time tomorrow, baby,
I thought. I took my eyes away from her face. Looking at her was too damned distracting, and I still had plenty to do. Part of what I’d come for had been accomplished but the big item still remained. How was I going to get in? The front door was out of the question; that was probably locked all the time. How about windows? They’d all be closed because of the air-conditioning. But maybe they wouldn’t be latched. There weren’t any windows in the living-room, however, except the big plate glass ones, and of course they didn’t open at all. I couldn’t think of any excuse to get into another part of the house to look for some. Maybe I’d been too optimistic.