It didn’t matter to me; as far as I was concerned I’d already seen enough of the Cannon family. And there was no reason, actually, that she had to; she had no connection with the accident. She wasn’t even in the car with him when he rode me off the pavement. Her lawyer and the insurance adjuster had taken care of smoothing down my hackles and working out a settlement that looked fair to me at the time. So why should she show up?

But then, again, when you thought about it, why shouldn’t she? Purvis had intimated she wasn’t grief-stricken quite to the point of throwing herself on the funeral pyre. And in five weeks she might have dropped around for a couple minutes some afternoon between the first and second cocktails and said, “I’m sorry my husband knocked your leg off. Here’s a roll of Scotch tape.”

So maybe she had avoided me deliberately. She knew I’d seen her out there near the lake less than fifteen minutes before the wreck and would probably recognize her if I saw her again. But I’d never mentioned the fact to anybody, so presumably I didn’t know just who it was I’d seen. If it were just any woman, it was of no importance; if it were Mrs. Cannon maybe it became highly significant. Why? Was she supposed to have been somewhere else at the time? I didn’t know, but one thing was certain as hell, if she didn’t want anybody to know she’d been out there, she would have been very careful to stay away from me.

But why was Purvis digging into it after all this time? It had been five months. Surely they must have had to pay off on the insurance policy before this, and when they paid you’d think they would write it off and close it. It didn’t make sense.

There was one more thing that didn’t make a lot of sense, and that was why I’d told Purvis I’d never seen her. It was just a hunch, and I still wasn’t sure why I’d done it. Well, I thought, I wasn’t Purvis’s mother, was I? Let him dig up his own information; he sure as hell hadn’t dislocated his jaw telling me anything. There was another angle, too. Suppose something a little funny had been going on out there that evening; the chump on the side-lines that got run over wasn’t Purvis. It was John Harlan.

I got up and dressed, and went out to dinner. It was a little after nine when I came back to the room with a copy of Field & Stream and tried to read. It was no use. I kept seeing a picture of a very lovely and very wealthy brunette who became widowed and even richer while I lay there with a Buick in my lap. Toss that seal a fish, Jeeves, so he’ll stop barking. Five thousand will do. The telephone rang. I reached over to the table beside the bed and picked it up.

“Harlan?” a man’s voice said. “This is Purvis again—”

“You still in town?” I asked.

“No. At home. I work out of the Houston office, or did I tell you? But what I called about—there was something else I wanted to ask. you.