"First time," I said, sipping coffee. It was awful. He must have made a
mistake and put salt into it instead of sugar.
"You think the claims I've been filing for my people are false?"
"The home office has some suspicions of that," I admitted.
"I don't blame them, but they ain't. Look, the company gambles on luck,
doesn't it?"
"No. It works on percentages calculated from past experience."
"But I mean it knows that there will be, say, a hundred fatal car
crashes in a day. But it doesn't know if maybe ninety of them will be
in Iowa and only ten in the rest of the country."
"There's something to that. We call it probability, not luck."
"Well, probability says that more accidents are going to occur in
Granite City than anywhere else in the country, per capita."
I shook my head at Thompson. "That's not probability. Theoretically,
anything can happen but I don't--I can't--believe that in this town
everybody has chanced to be an accident prone. Some other factor is
operating. You are all deliberately faking these falls and fires--"
"We're not," Thompson snapped.
"Or else something is causing you to have this trouble. Maybe the
whole town is a bunch of dope addicts. Maybe you grow your own mescalin
or marijuana; it's happened before."
Thompson laughed.
"Whatever is going on, I'm going to find it out. I don't care what you
do, but if I can find a greater risk here and prove it, the Commission
will let us up our rates for this town. Probably beyond the capacity of
these people, I'm afraid."
"That would be a real tragedy, Mr. Madison. Insurance is vital to this
town. Nobody could survive a year here without insurance. People pay me
for their premiums before they pay their grocery bills."
I shrugged, sorrier than I could let on. "I won't be able to pay for
my own groceries, marshal, if I don't do the kind of job the company
expects. I'm going to snoop around."
"All right," he said grudgingly, "but you'll have to do it on foot."
"Yes, I understood you didn't like cars on your streets. At least not
the cars of outsiders."
"That doesn't have anything to do with it. Nobody in Granite City owns
a car. It would be suicide for anybody to drive a car, same as it would
be to have a gas or oil stove, instead of coal, or to own a bathtub."