The Big Bite

by Charles Williams

  No, I thought. She would, perhaps, but he’d make it a personal thing. He wasn’t quite as tough, and he had the spurs in him. That business of her having to shack up with me for the past six days was riding him hard, and every time he thought about it it dug him a little more. They’d had to do it that way, and it had meant nothing to her, but he wasn’t liking it a bit. I’d seen it twice in the past half hour, and wondered about it. He was going to make it rough on me, as rough as he could, but there was another side to it, too. If you get emotional you can always lose your head, and if you do you’re never quite as dangerous as a cold type who’s just doing a job.

  He stepped back, took out a handkerchief, and wiped the sweat from his face. He’d been under a strain too, in spite of the calm way he looked outside. Suddenly he caught her in his arms. “Julia—!”

  She broke it up after the first wild clinch. “Please, Dan. Not in front of this vermin.”

  He turned his face and looked at me for an instant, his eyes savage. They went out and closed the door. It was an act out there at the cabin, I thought, but it wasn’t quite all an act.

  They didn’t come back; there was dead silence in the house. They were probably in her bedroom. I thought about it, trying to keep from getting panicky. It couldn’t happen, not here in the quiet upper-middle-class residential district of a small town where a dented fender in the Cadillac was a big deal. Next door they’d be playing bridge; up the street they were watching television or waiting for a daughter to get home from a date. Murder? Here? That was a pipe dream. Murder never happened in a place like this.

  I was simply being erased. I’d tried to move in on them without having a good look at them first, and now I was lying here watching myself disappear like a ripple dying out on a pond. Nobody would ever know it. Who’d miss me? Who’d raise an alarm? The police would impound my car in New Orleans, and after a long time they’d sell it for storage charges. George Gray would mutter into his soft-boiled eggs some morning that he couldn’t see why that sad bastard of a Harlan couldn’t at least have mailed back the key to the cabin. You wouldn’t expect the big moose to tell anybody he’d changed his mind about the job, but, by God, he could have sent back the key. The bank would keep sending statements to my apartment in Oklahoma City until the landlord closed it and sold my stuff for the rent. Three years from now some sports writer covering the pro football circuit would say to somebody in a bar that that guy out there this afternoon reminded him a little of Harlan. Wonder what ever happened to him; make mine a Martini on-the rocks—

  That was it. That was the thing that scared you till you felt cold right down in the guts. They could get away with it so easily. They’d done it before, and they’d do it again. One traffic fatality, one unsolved and forgotten murder two hundred miles away, and one disappearance nobody ever even noticed, and not once did they slip up. Six months from now there’d be a blurb in the local paper: Mrs. Julia Cannon and Mr. Daniel R. Tallant were married today in a simple ceremony at the bride’s lovely home on Cherrywood Drive. Mrs. Cannon, widow of the late Howard L. Cannon, Wayles automobile dealer, is prominent in social and civic activities, being vice president of the Women’s Club and one of the founders of the local Little Theatre group.

  I lay there looking up at the ceiling and watching myself disappear. Sweat collected on my forehead. The only way I could get it off was by turning my head and rubbing my face against the pillow.

  Sometime just before dawn he came in again, unshackled me, and let me go to the john. The gun was covering me every second. They fastened me down again and left. It grew light in the room. I knew he was gone for the day. She’d probably turned in again. I could hear cars out in the street once in a while, very faintly because with the air-conditioning turned on all the doors and windows were closed. I lay staring at nothing trying not to think. After a while I must have gone to sleep. It didn’t seem possible, but the next thing I knew she was standing beside the bed yanking the adhesive tape off my mouth.

  She was wearing a cotton house dress and had a handkerchief tied around her hair. A vacuum sweeper was whirring behind her and she had the hose and one of the brush attachments in her hand. She smiled, looking like any very attractive housewife in the world. Maybe it’s deliberate, I thought, trying to keep my stomach from turning over. The whole thing was calculated, in an attempt to break me down.

  The tape gave way, bringing the handkerchief out of my mouth. A power lawn mower was making a racket in the patio and I realized that was the reason she felt it was safe enough to remove the gag. There was hardly any chance I’d be heard if I yelled my head off anyway, even without the mower. There was nothing on the east side of the house but a deserted street and some woods.

  “Housework!” she said. She shrugged good-naturedly, and reached out with the toe of one shoe to press down the switch of the vacuum sweeper. It stopped whining. She sat down in the armchair near the bed and took a cigarette from a pocket of the dress.

  I said nothing.

  She lit the cigarette. “Do you want one?”

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “Very well, if you’re going to be surly. Oh, incidentally, just in case you should manage to grab me with one of those brutal looking hands, the keys to these handcuffs are in another room.”

  “Your luck’s going to run out on you some day,” I said.

  She blew out some smoke and looked at it thoughtfully. “It already has,” she replied quietly. “But I wouldn’t expect you to see that.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “About one p.m.”

  I thought about it. This was Thursday; if I hadn’t let them booby-trap me I’d have been on my way out of Houston right this minute with a fortune in my luggage and nothing to worry about. And now I was lying here waiting for the two of them to get around to murdering me.

  It must have shown on my face. Her eyebrows raised. “Really, where’s the treasured toughness?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  She leaned back in the chair and studied me reflectively. “You’re not really hard, you know. You’re merely insulated. And you’re a fool, in spite of that bit of sleight of hand the other day. You walked into this thing without even taking the trouble to learn something about the people you were going to try to blackmail. I wonder how long that veneer of toughness would have lasted if you’d ever had the intelligence to see, just once, how many ways there are in this world you can be utterly destroyed by random little sequences of events that look as harmless as marshmallows. If I hadn’t stepped out of the shadows in front of your car on a road down there in the swamp that evening five months ago, neither of us would be here in this position., That’s obvious, isn’t it? Dan Tallant’s car was down there too, and I thought you were Dan. But that’s also obvious. Even you saw it, so it must be, because you never see anything but the obvious.”

  “Why don’t you write it down?” I said. “Maybe some-body’ll publish, it.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t even heard me. “I don’t think you even know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean you alone. I mean all of us. We’re all destroyed, destroyed for wanting too many things and not caring how we get them. If you really want to preen yourself as a tough guy, Mr. Harlan, you should wait and be tough after there’s no longer any hope of winning. It’s easy till then. It’s also very bad to have any intelligence along with it but, fortunately, I think you have been spared that.”

  “Turn it off,” I said. “You’re not even making sense. I don’t read you at all.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of that. Perhaps I just felt like talking. And there is some satisfaction in the spectacle of the lordly Mr. Harlan in the role of captive audience. Imagine your having to listen to the inane babblings of a woman, and not only that but to the babblings of a woman you don’t even have any hope of bedding with—which is obviously the only thing women are any good for.

  “But to get back to the harmless little chains of events—where should we begin? Wi
th a boy going fishing, and liking it? Or a girl encountering cruelty for the first time, being laughed at at a children’s party because her shoes were half-soled? Ridiculous? Certainly. Thousands of children have been skewered by their contemporaries at parties, millions of men like to go on fishing trips. You have to fit in a horde of other harmless little things and match them up to get the right combination. But there are so many of them and so many combinations that will pay off in annihilation, sooner or later you can almost count on blowing yourself up. Add the fact that nowadays Chevrolet and Buicks look considerably alike, at least in the dusk and seen only in one quick glance. Add a man deciding to take a bag of laundry into town. Not any time, you understand, but this particular time.”

  She paused and smiled faintly, as if she were thinking of something a long way off. “Try this on your toughness, Mr. Harlan. None of this could have happened if those three cars had come out of that bottom in any other sequence at all. Mathematically, there are six possibilities, of course, if you merely shook them up in a dice cup. Consider that. On top of all the other interlocking little events that fell into their pattern to set up disaster, the odds were still six to one that they’d remain harmless and pass unnoticed. And yet the right number came up, and here we are.”

  “We are?”

  She nodded. “I realize the futility of trying to make you understand, Mr. Harlan. I’m merely talking. I don’t usually rattle on this way, but this afternoon for some reason I just felt in the mood. Here we are, as I say. Destroyed. And yet never once have you even stopped to wonder why those cars came out of the bottom in that particular sequence. Even aside from the laws of chance, there was every reason in the world my husband’s should have been the last. But it wasn’t. It was next to last, and that set up the disaster.”

  I couldn’t see what difference it made, now that it had happened and I was as good as dead, but I asked anyway. I could see she was going to go on talking, and there was no way I could shut her up.

  “Why should he have been last?”

  She shook her head. “You surprise me at times. You show flashes of intelligence, and then you go dead again. Purvis knew, and he didn’t even see me out there. He did it by sheer deduction. I was unfaithful to my husband. I realize you have already grasped this, at least as far as its surface aspects are concerned, and there would be no point in attempting to explore it to any depth because eventually we’d run into language connected with emotion, which obviously would have no meaning to you. How would you describe a sunset to a blind mole living on the dark side of the moon?

  “But I’m digressing. To get back to why the three cars came out of the bottom in that particular sequence—my husband, as you probably guessed, came out there to the Cannon summer cottage looking for us. He had been in Houston, but had returned ahead of schedule, probably for that very reason. And he found us. Or rather, I should say, he found Dan. I had wanted to be alone for a little while to think, and I’d taken a walk a short distance around the lake. Mr. Cannon, while he was not drunk, had had enough to be ugly. He became very abusive—he could be quite violent on occasion. Dan denied that I was with him. Of course, it was more or less obvious somebody must have been with him for he would hardly have come out there alone, and there was a good chance I was the one because Dan had no key to the place. Dan did the best he could, however, and insisted he had borrowed a key—several hunting and fishing cronies of Mr. Cannon’s had duplicates. This was a flimsy thing at best, because it could be easily checked, but Dan was desperate and was hoping I would hear the row and stay out of sight. I did. I circled the clearing the cabin was in and started out the road, knowing Dan would come along and pick me up. It is a little over a quarter mile out to where the two roads join—that one and the one going on around to George Gray’s cabin, where you were staying. I passed this juncture—you will recall the place where you saw me was about two hundred yards this side of it. I was waiting there for Dan to drive by. When I saw your car coming, of course, I thought it was he. When I realized my mistake, I stepped back off the road again. Then it occurred to me Dan might have some difficulty picking me up. Obviously, Mr. Cannon, being suspicious, would not leave first. Dan would have to. And Mr. Cannon would be following him very closely to see if he did meet someone along the road. This is precisely what happened. When Dan came by, only a few minutes after you did, he caught sight of me but did not stop. He motioned for me to stay out of sight. My husband’s Cadillac was right behind him. Surely it must have occurred to you there was something strange in the fact my husband’s car wasn’t the last one in the procession?”

  I hadn’t even thought about it. And I didn’t care. What difference did it make now?

  “Turn it off,” I said. “I knew the two of you’d killed him, and that was all I was interested in.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  “I told you I felt like talking, so even at the risk of boring you I’ll proceed. What happened, naturally, was that Dan speeded up going around some turns in the road, and got far enough ahead to pull off and out of sight. My husband went on past, and when he caught up with you just after you got out on the highway, it was perfectly natural that he thought you were Dan. Dan came back and got me. So there you have the marching order for disaster. What you didn’t know, and what I don’t think Purvis even guessed, was that we actually saw the crash.”

  “You did? I didn’t think you were that close behind.”

  “We were about a mile back, but if you’ll recall the road drops off a long hill into that river bottom where you crashed. It isn’t straightaway, but from the brow of the hill you can see the road going across that straight section of fill and the bridge itself. We happened to be right there when it happened. Of course you both had your headlights on then and we didn’t know for sure it was your car my husband had driven off the road—not until we got there, that is—but it was perfectly obvious the whole thing was deliberate. He had at least another mile of straight road ahead of him, and there were no other cars in sight at all. The inference was inescapable.”

  “So you’re going to get away with it?” I said.

  Her eyes were moody as she studied the end of her cigarette and it was a moment before she answered. “Do you ever?” she asked.

  16

  “What do you mean?”

  “Getting away with it, as you put it, is perhaps only an illusion. You go on delaying the ultimate disaster, but you never eliminate it.”

  I jumped at this. “Well, get wise to yourself. Turn me loose—”

  She smiled coldly. “Really you are a child. I assure you we have every intention of going on. We began it, and now we can’t ever go back. Neither, I might add, can you.”

  “Then why do it? Why get yourself in any deeper?”

  Her eyebrows raised. “Deeper?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Really. Don’t be absurd. There’s only one depth, and that’s absolute. You wouldn’t say something was more dead, would you, or more pregnant?”

  “So you’d do it just because you’ve got nothing more to lose?”

  “Not at all. We’ll do it because we have to. Removing you and your threat is another bulkhead shored up, another ringer in the dike, another postponing of the inevitable. Futile? Perhaps. But what do you do when you see the bulkhead crumpling? You shore it up, even while you’re watching the next one start to buckle. But perhaps I’m tiring you.”

  I stared at her. “Well, what in the name of God did you do it for if you didn’t think you could win?”

  “Well, obviously, because we thought we could—then. Five months have changed that—for me, at least. You have too much time to think. Too much time to—as you put it—look at the odds. Incidentally, that is a very good parallel. Imagine a roulette wheel that ran for five months, or a year, or ten years, before it stopped. With all your money bet on just one number and with that much time to examine the laws of probability, you must inevitably come to doubt the wisd
om of it. Add to that the fact that you never really know for sure when the roulette wheel has stopped. It may be an illusion, a very deliberate illusion fostered by the people who are operating it, if you follow me.

  “There are too many possibilities inherent in any situation like this, too many factors completely out of your control and utterly unpredictable. Purvis shouldn’t have become suspicious, but he did. The possibility of your paths ever crossing again was mathematically negligible, but it happened. The odds were astronomical against your being in Purvis’s apartment at the precise moment he was killed, and even laughably impossible that you could have been there without being seen, and yet—” She shrugged and crushed out the cigarette.

  “You think the police will catch up with you some day, then?”

  “I think it quite likely,” she said.

  “Then I don’t see why you keep on.” Her eyebrows raised. “You don’t? I thought I had just told you.” She stood up and looked down at me. “But there is another facet to it which you may be able to understand. I should hate very much to be defeated by you. I underestimated you once and let you make a fool of me. It won’t happen again.”

  I started to say something. She shoved the handkerchief back in my mouth and plastered the tape over it. She started out, but turned in the doorway. “Oh, I forgot to ask if you wanted anything to eat.”

  I stared at her, not even bothering to shake my head.