“Hello,” she said when she came back on. “This is four months old, but he might still be there.”

I wrote it down. “Thanks a million,” I said.

I hung up and lit a cigarette. So that’s the way it was. It explained a number of things, such as why the company was still pawing around in the mess months after they should have paid off on the policy. The company wasn’t. They’d probably paid long ago and written it off as closed, but Purvis had gone into business for himself. Blackmail, extortion—call it whatever you liked. Something had made him suspicious when he’d gone up there to investigate, while he was still on the payroll. Maybe he’d never reported any of it, and now he was getting ready to put the squeeze on somebody. He’d hoped to get a little more ammunition, so he’d come down to pump me again. I was just the chump in the middle. Maybe I should rent myself out as a battleground so they could go on walking back and forth across my face with their tug-of-war for the rest of my life. If Cannon had crashed me deliberately, somebody in that mess had short-changed me about fifty thousand dollars, the way I saw it, and it was about time I found out who it was. Purvis knew, so what better place to start? I reached for the telephone again and put in a call to the number the girl had given me.

There was no answer. “Shall I try again in about ten minutes?” the operator asked.

“Please,” I said.

There was still no answer then, and I came up with the same empty ringing when I tried twice more during the morning. Well, maybe he had another job; he wouldn’t be home perhaps until around five or six in the afternoon. I went out on the beach and tried to swim, but I was wild with impatience and kept thinking of Purvis. At a few minutes of six I came back to the room and tried the number again.

A man’s voice answered, a tired and irritable voice.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Purvis,” I said. “Is he there?”

“Mr. Who?” he rasped.

“Purvis. P-u-r-v-i-s. Does he live there?”

“Nah. Yah got the wrong nummer, mate. He moved away from here a long time ago.”

“Well, do you know where I can get hold of him? Did he leave a forwarding—?”

“Nah, nah. Got no idea where he is.”

He hung up.

I stood looking at the phone. What now? Get hold of a Houston directory and start calling all the Purvises until I found him? Not on toll charges, anyway; if I were going to do that I’d better go up there. And what if he lived in a boarding house? The phone wouldn’t even be listed under his name. Well, hell, I had to do something; sitting here wondering about it would drive me crazy.