The Big Bite - By Charles Williams Page 0,1

drunk sideswiped me and knocked me off the highway and when I quit rolling I was sitting in a ditch holding a Buick convertible in my lap. I thought of five more years and sixty to seventy thousand dollars doing the only thing I had ever liked or was any good at, and my hands knotted. I swung my fist at the leg and knocked it off the luggage stand where it was propped. The big lump of muscle on the calf ridged up and hurt as I walked into the shower. I stared bleakly at the white tile wall while the water poured over me. The dirty, sad, drunken, son— There wasn’t even any use cursing him. He was dead. He’d been killed in the same wreck.

I checked out before the squad came in from practice, caught a bus into Los Angeles, and sat around the airport until I could get on a plane going east. I didn’t really know where I was going, and didn’t care. I got off in New Orleans and for one of the few times in my life I went on a binge myself. It was a honey and lasted a week; when I began to come out of it I was in a motel somewhere on U.S. 90 out toward the Mississippi line with a girl named Frances. I never did know her last name and couldn’t figure out where she’d come from or how we’d got away out there unless they’d put us off a bus, but it didn’t seem to matter. She knew nothing about football and cared less, and had never heard of me, which was fine, but she drank like somebody trying to finish a highball while a cab was waiting outside with the meter running. She seemed to think something terrible was going to happen to her if she ever sobered up. The third morning I got up while she was still asleep and caught a bus back to town. I didn’t know what the answer was yet, but drinking wasn’t it. I went over to Galveston and swam in the surf and lay in the sun on the beach until I’d cooked the booze out of my system. The fourth day I was there Purvis caught up with me.

I was staying at one of the beach hotels and was just coming in through the lobby in swim trunks and a terry cloth robe late in the afternoon when a man reading a paper in one of the chairs got up and came toward me. He caught me just as I stepped into the elevator.

“John Harlan?” he asked.

“That’s right,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“Purvis,” he said. “Old Colony Insurance.”

“Save yourself a trip,” I cut him off. “I don’t need any.” But the elevator boy had already closed the door and we were going up.

Purvis shook his head. “I don’t sell it. I’d just like to talk to you a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”

I shrugged. “You an adjuster?” I couldn’t see why they’d be pawing through it now. The whole thing had been settled five months ago.

“Investigator,” he said.

I looked at him then, for the first time, and knew I’d seen him somewhere before. He was about five-ten, and slender, with a built-in slouch, and appeared to be around forty although the hair showing under the beat-up old felt hat was completely gray. His clothes looked as if he dressed by jumping into them from the top of a stepladder. You wouldn’t have given him a second glance, unless the first one had been at his face. It was thin and gray and a little tired, but there was a deadly efficiency about it you couldn’t miss even if you were half asleep. The eyes were gray too, and as impersonal as outer space. I remembered then where I’d seen him before.

“You came to the hospital,” I said.

He nodded.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. I led the way down the corridor, unlocked the door, and stood back for him to go in. The room was on the south side, with a window looking out over the Gulf, but there was little breeze and it was breathless and hot. It was just at sunset and the piled masses of cloud to seaward were fired with red and orange, some of which was reflected back into the room to give it a strange, wine-colored light. He sat down in the armchair near the door, took