And what’s the percentage in building a drunk-driving case against a dead man? You going to take him to court?”

“What about your outfit?”

“What difference did proof of drunkenness make to us? He was dead. We had to pay off on his life insurance, whether he was crocked or sober. By the time I got up there it would have been impossible, anyway. They'd already buried him. I was just making a routine investigation, until I began to see there could have been another reason for his driving you off the road. I backtracked down the, highway until I found the place he bought the bottle—”

“The same one? How do you know?”

He shrugged wearily. “Jesus. I don’t know. All that’s certain is that it was a pint, and that it was the same brand. Sure, he could have had three more in the meantime and thrown the bottles out. But in the insurance business you get in the habit of playing the percentages, and the percentages say that was the same bottle. He appeared to be sober when he bought it, and I doubt very much that two-thirds of it would have made him so drunk he couldn’t see something as big as a Buick convertible. Now, can we drop that for the moment?”

“Sure.” I said. “Go on.”

He leaned back in his chair and studied me thoughtfully. “I gather from the fact you’re here you might be interested in renegotiating your settlement with Mrs. Cannon?”

"Right," I said.

“It’ll be a little extra-legal, if you follow me.”

“So it’s extra-legal. It’s money. Did she collect the insurance?”

He nodded. “And she’s loaded, besides. Cannon left an estate that’ll add up to somewhere around three hundred thousand, after taxes. No other heirs.”

I leaned forward on the sofa. “All right. Go on.”

“Say a hundred grand. Split seventy-five, twenty-five.”

“Seventy-five for me?”

He shook his head with a pained kind of smile on his face. “Seventy-five for me, chum.”

“Back off and look again,” I said. “The wind’s whistling through your head.”

“How’s that?”

“Who got run over out there that night? You, or me?”

He shrugged. “That doesn’t enter into it. Who dug up the evidence, after everybody else had sloughed it off as a traffic fatality?”

“You’ve got more?”

“More what?”

“Evidence.”

“Some,” he said. “But maybe not quite enough. That’s where you come in.”

“Where I come in is when somebody says sixty grand.