The Big Bite (9 page)

“Cigarette?” I asked, holding out the pack.

She shook her head.

“Better have one,” I said. “Good for the nerves. This is going to be a little rugged.”

“Would you mind just saying whatever it was you forced your way in here to say—”

“Right,” I answered. “I’ve got something here I’d like you to read.”

She stared at me as I took the folded yellow pages of the carbon copy from the breast pocket of my jacket. I held them while I finished lighting the cigarette and dropped the match in a tray. “Here,” I said.

She unfolded them. I studied her face as she started to read. There was a hint of shock right at first, and I knew that, was when she saw the thing was addressed to the two District Attorneys. From then on her face was a mask—a very lovely honey-colored mask dominated by two brown eyes that were completely inscrutable. She finished, folded it up, and dropped it on the coffee table.

I leaned back on the sofa with my hands behind my head and the cigarette hanging out of the side of my mouth. “Well?” I asked.

She took one of the cigarettes from the pack I had left lying on the table. She lit it with the table lighter. Her hands were steady. “Mr. Harlan,” she asked quietly, “do. you mind if I ask a rather personal question? Have you ever been confined in a mental institution?”

“Pretty good act,” I said. “But you’re wasting time.”

“I mean it.”

I sighed. “This is a nice routine, but we can skip the rest of it, if it’s all right with you, and get on with the negotiations. I want a hundred thousand dollars. Do I get it?”

She stared at me. “You couldn’t be serious.”

I nodded toward the letter. “You read that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. And a more fantastic—”

I cut her off. “Save the arguments for the jury. If this goes to trial you’re going to need them. The two of you killed your husband while he was unconscious, and if you think you can get that reduced from murder in the first degree, you’re crazy as hell. The jury wouldn’t be out long enough to finish their cigarettes. Now, listen—”

“Of all the utterly fantastic, insane—”

I leaned forward across the table. “Shut up, and I’ll read the score to you. You and Tallant and your husband can go around killing each other every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and I couldn’t care less. But when you rope me in on it it’s a different story. Your husband deliberately tried to kill me because he thought I was Tallant, and he wound up by putting a permanent wave in one of my legs. They may not look like much, compared to Grable’s, but I made a damn good living with them, and now I don’t any more. He left you a hundred thousand dollars in insurance, but that was just a clerical error. He should have left it to me. I’ve come after it. Do I get it, or don’t I?”

She stared at me. “You have a wonderful imagination, Mr. Harlan, even if it is slightly deranged. My husband was drinking. He lost control of his car—”

I cut her off; “We’ve wasted enough time. Get Tallant on the phone. I’ll tell you what to say.”

“You mean the Mr. Tallant who runs the sporting goods shop?”

“Among other things, that’s the Mr. Tallant. Now get with it.”

Her eyebrows raised. “And if I don’t?”

I reached across the table, caught her by the front of the robe, and hauled her to her feet. “You’re not big enough to tell me whether you will or won’t. Where’s the phone?”

The brown eyes were full of contempt. “You’re looking right at it.” She half turned her head and nodded. The telephone was on a stand in the corner of the room between the rear window and the dining-room door.

“Come on,” I said. I took her arm and propelled her ahead of me. The directory was on a shelf under the instrument. I handed it to her opened to the first page inside the cover.

“There are the numbers,” I said. “The local police, and the Sheriff’s office. If you think I’m bluffing, or crazy, here’s your chance to call me. Dial either one. Tell them a man has forced his way into your house and is threatening you. They’ll have a car here in less than three minutes.”

She eyed me coolly. “And in less than two I would be disfigured for life.”

“I won’t touch you. I’ve got a gun, but I won’t resist arrest, either. I’m not that silly. Add it up. Carrying a gun without a permit, illegal entry, assault, attempted extortion—say five to ten years for a package deal. Go ahead.”

She looked at me and then at the telephone. I picked up the instrument and held it out toward her. “Call the police. Or call Tallant. It’s up to you.”

She tried to bluff it out. For an instant her eyes locked with mine, but then they dropped. She lifted the receiver and dialed.

It wasn’t one of the emergency numbers. She was calling Tallant.

“Just say something’s come up,” I ordered, “and that he’s to get over here as fast as he can. Not another word.”

She stared coldly. In the dead silence of the room I could hear the phone ringing at the other end. It stopped.

“Mr. Tallant?” she asked. “This is Mrs. Cannon. Something has come up, and I wonder if you could drive over here right away—”

I pressed down the plunger on the cradle to break the connection and took the receiver away from her, but the damage was already done.

“Smart,” I said. “But that’s all right. He can’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?” she asked coldly.

“Skip it,” I said. I put the phone back on the stand. This girl was sharp. If Tallant had come on cold, without knowing how much she might have already said, I’d have had the advantage. But she’d outfoxed me, and tipped him. She’d told him as plainly as if she’d drawn him a picture that I was here—or somebody was here putting the pressure on her, but that she hadn’t admitted a thing.
Mr.
Tallant— Hah.

But suppose? For just a moment uncertainty took hold of me. Maybe she really didn’t know him. I knew he had killed Purvis, all right, because I’d seen him, but the rest of it was just a lot of logical surmises strung together. And if she
hadn’t
had anything to do with Cannon’s death, I was as far up the creek as you could get without a helicopter.

No,
I thought suddenly.
The hell she wasn’t implicated. Use your head
. She’s given herself away twice in the past three minutes. She chickened out when you threw that bluff at her about calling the police. And she made an even bigger boo-boo.

“You’re pretty smooth,” I said, “but you goofed on that one.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s
Mister
Tallant and
Mrs.
Cannon, but you dialed his number without looking it up.”

We were still facing each other by the telephone. “Really?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Is that so remarkable? We happen to be on a committee together.”

“What kind of committee?”

“We’re trying to form a Little Theatre group.”

“Very interesting,” I said. I went back and sat down on the end of the sofa. He’d be here any minute now, and I was beginning to grow tense again. The two of them together were going to be something to handle. She remained across the room looking at me as if I were something that had crawled out of a shower drain. We waited. Nobody said anything. The silence went on building up so that when the door chime tinkled out in the kitchen it was like a hand-grenade going off.

She turned and started toward the entrance hallway. The instant she was through the door I reached down behind the sofa and flipped the switch of the recorder. Then I sprang up and followed her. I was leaning against the door frame between the living-room and the entry hall when she opened the outer door. Tallant was standing on the porch.

We were almost the same size exactly, but he could have been a year or so younger and you had to admit he was a handsome devil. It was obvious he’d never plowed up as many stadiums with his face as I had, but nobody except a chump would have ever called his good looks girlish. The eyes were blue-gray and rather hard, and the cleft chin didn’t detract at all from the tough competence of the jaw. The short-cropped dark hair had a tendency to be curly.
A smooth hunk of cookie,
I thought. Whether you were after the same girl or the same fumble, he’d give you a bad time either way.

“Come in, Mr. Tallant,” she said. I didn’t have any idea what kind of messages she was passing along to him with her eyes, but I watched his. I also cased him for a gun, but didn’t see any place he could be carrying one. He was wearing a sports shirt and no jacket.

He stepped inside the entry hall. As she closed the door he inclined his head a little in my direction and said, “Who’s this?” It wasn’t too convincing. He knew who I was, all right.

I lounged against the door frame and watched his face. “I’m a Federal radio inspector,” I said. “Checking up on television interference in the neighborhood.”

He was good, all right, and he’d been prepared, but that was a little too hot to field without showing it. I saw it hit him for a fraction of a second before he covered.

He frowned then. “What’s this?” he asked quietly. “A gag?”

“Never mind,” I said. “You’ve already answered your own question. Come on in and sit down. I’ve got something I want you to read.”

I stepped aside and let them come through the doorway. I was careful not to let him get too near, and he was just as careful not to turn his back, though it was all too well covered to be obvious. Nobody said anything for a moment, but tension was like smoke in the room.

I’d left the letter on the coffee table intentionally. He’d have to go there to pick it up, so the logical place to sit down would be the handiest—the sofa or one of the chairs facing it. I nodded in that direction. “Mrs. Cannon’s already read the good news,” I said. “I think she missed one angle of it, but you’ll probably catch on. If you’ll notice, it’s a carbon copy.”

“Say, what the hell is this?” he asked roughly. “Who are you? And what do you want?”

I waved a hand. “The letter, Tallant. Why don’t you just pick it up and read it? It’ll explain everything.”

He shrugged indifferently and walked over to the coffee table, picked up the folded yellow sheets, and sat down on the end of the sofa where I’d been. She lit a cigarette with studied arrogance and perched on the arm of one of the big chairs. I watched his face as he read. The mouth grew ugly. When he finished he looked up at me, his eyes hard.

I stood back out of reach and gave them the pitch, straight down the middle and smoking. “All right. I told you it was a carbon copy. You can see that for yourselves. A friend of mine has two originals, both signed. If anything happens to me, they go in the mail, one to the District Attorney at Houston and the other to the D.A. here. They’ll have three murders to work on, and you can figure out for yourselves what the odds are that they’ll be able to burn you for at least one. Don’t think you can hide me well enough, either. If they don’t find me for ten years they’ll still be able to identify what’s left with that dope on the broken leg and the dental work.

“Everybody knows I was under my own car there at the wreck, and if the police get this letter they’ll know I was in the next room when Purvis was killed because there’s never been anything in the papers about those two bottles of beer. You haven’t got a chance in the world.

“Hold still and you won’t get hurt. All I want is a hundred thousand dollars, which is exactly what you collected from the insurance company. There’s plenty more, and none of it would do you any good in Death Row. So how’s it going to be?”

While I was talking Tallant had got hold of himself again, and now there was only a nasty smile on his face as he looked at me. “You mean you’ve got the guts to try to shake Mrs. Cannon down with a pipe dream like this?”

“Come off it, Jocko,” I said. “I was standing in the next room when you killed Purvis. You want to deny it on the stand?”

He picked up the letter again and made a big deal of looking for something in it. “Here it is.
‘—in the kitchen, where I could not be seen from the living-room—’
 I assume from the way you put it that Purvis—whoever he was—was killed in the living-room. Now, this man couldn’t see you, but you could see him. You have X-ray eyes, or something?”

“I didn’t say I saw you kill him,” I replied. “I said I was in the next room. But you were the only person in there with him, and I don’t think he could hit himself over the head hard enough to break his own arm and split his head open at the same time. Little far-fetched, wouldn’t you think?”

He snorted. “So you didn’t
see
the man, but you say it was me. It just came to you, like that? A revelation, or something?”

“I saw you go out,” I said wearily.

“Oh, you saw the man go out the door? He backed out, is that it?”

“No, he didn’t back out.”

“Then you saw him from the rear?”

“That’s right.”

“You never did see his face?”

“No,” I said. I was beginning to get a little tired of it, but if it made him feel any better to think he was making a monkey of me it was all right.

“Did this man have his name stenciled on his clothes somewhere in back?”

“Oh, knock it off, Tallant. You can play Mr. District Attorney some other time.”

He looked at Mrs. Cannon and spread his hands. He smiled. “The defense rests.”

“Never mind the hokum,” I said. “The question is do you want the police to have this? So far, you’re covered from every angle. Nobody suspects you. But they get one look at this, and everything hits the fan. They’ll come at you from a thousand angles at once. They’ll question you separately for thirty-six hours at a time and it’s going to be hard to remember what the other one’s supposed to be saying and what you’re supposed to be saying and what you
did
say fourteen hours ago when you had your last cigarette, and then they’ll tell you the other one has cracked wide open and is trying to turn State’s evidence to get off with life. You want to try it and see how you hold up?”

He lit a cigarette and shrugged. “If you think the police will take the word of a blackmailing creep like you against a woman of her standing, go ahead and stick your neck out. They’ll make it plenty rough for you.”

“When you get tired of bluffing,” I said, “we’ll start to talk business.”

“We’ve already talked it. She’s not going to pay you a nickel for any framed-up mess of lies like this, and I’d advise you to fade while you still can.”

“How about letting her answer for herself, chum? It’s her neck.”

I turned and glanced at her; she was still perched on the arm of the chair, smoking. Her eyes met mine coolly. “I never heard anything as fantastic in my life.”

He gestured with the hand holding the cigarette. “So, scram.”

“That’s your answer, is it?” I said, making it come up tough.

“That’s our answer.”

It was time for a little bluster. “All right, friend, I see you want to do it the hard way. Go ahead and stew about it for a while. Start wondering just where Purvis got his information. Purvis was a cop, and a good one, and he didn’t look in a crystal ball to find out she had a boy friend and that Cannon learned about it and that Cannon wasn’t that drunk when he drove me off the road. You want to know where he got this information? He got it the same way the police’ll get it when they start checking—by talking to people, a little bit here and a little bit there. Purvis did it alone; so go ahead and start wondering just how much a dozen men working on it can dig up.

“Just simmer for a while. I’ll be around, and when you start making sense you can get in touch with me. I’m a bargain, but you’d better hurry and make up your minds before the price starts going up.”

I picked up the letter and let myself out the front door. As I got in the car and pulled away from the curb I saw the drapes over the front window twitch just slightly. They were making sure I was gone. I went straight ahead for three blocks and then turned downhill. At the corner I turned right again and was on the parallel street behind the Cannon house. I pulled to the curb and stopped. It was 8:25.

So far, so good,
I thought. It had gone off about as I had expected. It had hit him hard at first, until he’d had time to recover and think a little. That friend-with-a-copy gag was so old it had whiskers, and he knew it, but there was just enough possibility I might be telling the truth to make him hold off and bluff while he stalled for time. When he finally convinced himself I was working alone he’d come out there to the cabin and blow my head off while I was asleep. I lit a cigarette and took a couple of puffs on it. Everything depended on the next few minutes.

Suppose they had moved, gone into the bedroom or somewhere?
Oh, hell,
I thought;
quit stewing about it. You set them up like Arruza putting a bull into position; there’s no reason they should move.
I looked at my watch again. It was time.

I pulled away from the curb and drove straight ahead until I hit the street going uphill past the side of the Cannon house. I turned and went up. When I swung around the next corner I saw Tallant’s convertible still parked at the curb. I cut the motor and eased to a stop. There was no movement at the front window drapes; they wouldn’t be expecting me now. I went silently up the walk, carefully turned the knob on the front door, pulled it open, and went in fast.

I could hear Tallant’s voice sounding angry in the living-room. It chopped off abruptly, and I knew they had heard the front door open. As I came striding through the doorway from the entry hall they whirled and stared at me. He was lighting a cigarette by the coffee table and she was across by the rear window as if she had been staring out into the patio.

Tallant recovered first. His face hardened and he took a step toward me. “We told you once, Harlan—”

I took the .45 out of my pocket and pointed it at him, “Turn around,” I ordered. “Go to the other end of the room and sit down on that hearth.”

He stopped, cautious but not too scared. You could almost read his thought. I couldn’t be very sure of my ground if I had to resort to throwing my weight around and trying to scare them with a gun. He turned and shot a glance at her.
Get a load of this character,
it seemed to say.

“Move,” I snapped at him.

“Knock it off, you silly bastard—”

“Move!”

He moved then. Maybe he thought I’d gone crazy and it would be a good thing to humor me. He backed across the room and sat down on the hearth, smiled wearily at her, and shrugged. I shot a quick glance at her myself. She had remained where she was, near the window. She was still outwardly cool and arrogant, but I thought I saw the beginnings of apprehension in her eyes. Maybe she was quicker than he was, and was already beginning to wonder if something hadn’t gone wrong with the script.

I stepped forward, still holding the gun in my right hand. With the left I picked up the red-shaded lamp on the end table and dropped it On the sofa. Sliding the table out of the way, I pushed the end of the sofa away from the wall and reached behind it. They froze dead still now and stared as if hypnotized. I watched them as I lifted the recorder into view.