The Big Bite Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the other end of the block. Purvis’s apartment was on the third floor. I pressed the buzzer. In a moment the door clicked and I went in.
    It was a walk-up. I went up two steps at a time, meeting no one in the halls or on the stairs, but hearing snatches of what sounded like the same television program on all three floors. Number 303 was the first one on the right at the head of the stairs. I touched the bell and Purvis opened the door almost immediately. He nodded, but said nothing until I had come inside and the door was closed.
    It was a small living-room. Directly across from the door was a window which presumably looked out on the street, but the blind was drawn all the way down. At the left was an open door going into the bedroom, while on the right, just opposite it, another opened into a small dinette. The living-room was fitted with the usual landlord-tan wallpaper and the beat-up odds and ends of shabby furniture that would come with a furnished deadfall in this neighborhood, so dreary and like a thousand others that Purvis’s things stood out and hit you right in the eye the moment you walked in. There were five or six framed copies of paintings of girls in ballet costumes, the same pictures you sometimes see in the anterooms of doctors’ offices. Some arty, horse-faced girl I got stuck with once at a party told me who the painter was that did them, but I couldn’t remember now. Dago was all I could think of, but that wasn’t it. There were some more pictures in one big frame over a desk at the right, beside the doorway going into the dinette, but these were photographs. They were all signed, and they were, all of ballet dancers. There must have been a dozen of them. An aficionado, I thought, remembering that way he had of describing things with his hands and what he had said about motion. In a corner across the room near the window was a high-fidelity sound system that blended into the other furnishings like a thousand-dollar bill among the nickels on a Salvation Army tambourine. It was playing something longhair.
    “Sit down, Harlan,” he said, nodding to the old sofa at my left. He went over and turned off the music, and then folded his lank frame into a chair near the desk. “Les Sylphides,” he murmured.
    “Meyer,” I said.
    His eyebrows raised. “How’s that?”
    “A gag,” I said. “Skip it. You had something to tell me.”
    He was dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a dark sports shirt with long sleeves. It was hot in the room in spite of the little fan whirring away on top of the desk, but he didn’t sweat. The cynical, young-old face was fine-boned and pale and very tired, but that deadly efficiency was still there in the eyes. There wasn’t much to him inside the clothes; you felt that if you put a hand on his chest and pushed he’d fold up around your arm like a wet towel. He lit a cigarette and regarded me through the smoke.
    “Her husband crashed you deliberately,” he said casually. “But I suppose you know that by now.”
    “Yes,” I said. “Or maybe I was just supposed to be a by-product. He could have been trying to kill her.”
    “Both of you, I think.”
    I remembered what she had done when I saw her out there by the lake and knew he was probably right, but I didn’t say anything. He was going to do the talking this time.
    “What was it tipped you in the first place?” I asked. “There’s nothing suspicious about a guy being found dead in a bad car smash-up.”
    He shrugged. “Be corny, and call it a sixth sense. I don’t know what it is, but you get it after a while if you keep going to these things long enough. You pull a hundred packages out of the file and they’re all just about alike, but one of ‘em will start you ringing like a burglar alarm. The first thing was the way his head was pushed in—”
    “Well,” I interrupted, “he did roll a car at sixty-five miles an hour. He figured to get bruised a little—”
    “Sure,” he said. “But when