"You saying she was in love with you?” Brad asked.
"Yeah. She said she never knew what real sex was until I came along. She started talking about leaving King; she wanted us to run away together."
"How'd you feel about that?"
"I liked the idea,” Bliss replied candidly. “But I wanted her to divorce him first. I mean, hell, why just run off and leave all that alimony behind?"
"Real sentimental, aren't you?” It wasn't a question and Bliss knew it. He half smiled.
"Just being practical."
"Well, things seemed to have worked out in one respect,” Brad said. “Sheriff told me you killed King. So now he's out of the way and I presume his wife got a lot more than just alimony. Only problem is, she's out there with all the money and you're in here rolling your own cigarettes. And facing the hot seat."
"Yeah, but I didn't do it!” Bliss declared angrily.
"Who did, then?"
"Had to have been Diane. Wasn't nobody else in the picture. She must have figured that if she sued for divorce, he would countersue, name me, and then she'd get nothing. If she got nothing, she wouldn't get me, because I wasn't about to run off with her unless she had some dough."
"You and her plan the thing together?” Brad asked bluntly.
"No! I didn't have nothing to do with it!"
"You telling me it was all her? Her idea, her plan, her killing?"
"Like I said, had to have been. Look here, at my trial, Diane testified that her husband was supposed to have been in Copiah County buying cotton, and stayed there overnight. That wasn't true; he had left there around six o'clock to drive back home. Hell, it idn't but about a hunnerd miles down there; no reason for him not to come back home, him driving a brand-new Cadillac Sedan DeVille with one of them V-8 engines in it.
"Anyway, Diane's story was that he had not come home. Next morning, she had their cook serve her breakfast on the east patio, which was her favorite side of the mansion; I had ringed the whole patio with yellow roses, which was also her favorite. So she testified that she was having breakfast, looking across the east grounds of the estate, when she noticed a lot of activity among some blackbirds down there where the boundary hedge separates the property from the road. She was curious, she said, so she walked across the lawn to see what the birds was so excited about. She claimed she found her husband's body just beyond the hedge, in a gully by the side of the road. He'd been stabbed in the chest."
"Oh?” Brad's eyebrows went up innocently. “Stabbed with what?"
Bliss looked down at the jail floor. “Coroner said it was probably an ice pick."
"Surprise, surprise,” said Brad.
"Yeah. The story made the papers in Jackson, Tupelo, Oxford, all over, saying I was among the people being questioned. Couple days later, some smart-ass reporter on the Commercial Appeal up in Memphis tipped the law down here about my old trial up there. I got locked up down here real quick and charged with the killings."
"I see. Now you're trying to tell me the victim's wife did it. With an ice pick. Did she know about the case up in Memphis?"
Bliss shook his head. “No."
Brad stared starkly at him. “Then this has to be one hell of a great big coincidence, wouldn't you say so, Bliss?"
The prisoner sighed heavily. “I guess so,” he said wearily. Then his square jaw clenched. "But—I—did—not—do—it!"
"All right, then,” Brad said patiently. “Tell me what you think happened."
Bliss drew a deep breath. “I think King did come home that night. I think maybe he was out walking the grounds of the estate; they was all well lighted, and I mean, he was a real nut about those grounds; used to walk around admiring the flowerbeds, the hedges, the fruit trees, the lawn. I think he might have been down by that hedge and Diane got him with an ice pick."
"What about the servants, wouldn't they have known it if he had come home?"
Bliss shook his head. “They only had two: a cook and a housekeeper. Colored women, sisters; they mostly kept to the other side of the mansion, where the kitchen and linen pantry was at, and they always went home when they finished cleaning up after supper. King could've come home late without either one of them knowing it."
"What about his Cadillac?"
"It was parked uptown at his office. Not unusual; he frequently parked it there and walked to and from the office and the mansion; it was only about half a mile. He probably stopped in his office for something when he got back from Copiah County, then just walked on home from there."
Brad fell silent for several long moments, lips pursed reflectively, eyes fixed on Edward Bliss. Finally, he asked quietly, “What is it you think I can do for you?"
"I don't know, just investigate what I've told you. Everybody down here is so goddamned sure that the killer had to be me, nobody did any real looking anywhere else. I'd be setting here with nobody in the world to help me if I hadn't come across that story about you in that ratty old magazine. Look, maybe if you talk to Diane, you can trick her into telling you something. Maybe if you look at the police reports, the autopsy report, check out his car if you can, look at where they found the body—you know, see if there's anything that points to Diane or anybody else.” He looked pleadingly at Lon Bradford. “You can at least try, Mr. Bradford, to keep an innocent man from going to the electric chair."
Brad took his foot off the stool and stood up. “All right, I'll check around, see what I can find. But not for the reason you just gave. Because you and I both know that you're not an innocent man, Bliss. You haven't been since Memphis."
* * * *
Brad left the jail and crossed the town square to the Farmers Bank of Temple, where he cashed the check Bliss had given him. Then he stood out on the street for a few minutes, having a look around. Temple wasn't much different from the little town of Lamont, Tennessee, where Brad himself had once been a county sheriff. Temple looked like a nice little town. A county courthouse occupied the center of the square, in front of which stood a statue of Confederate Colonel Travis Temple, the local hero. It was surrounded on four sides by a bank, dry goods store, five-and-dime, drugstore, picture show, and numerous other small businesses that make up a small town in the South. Across the way was a two-story red-brick building with an aged wooden sign across the front that read: TEMPLE TIMES—SERVING YOAKUM COUNTY SINCE 1895.
Crossing to the courthouse, and noticing the absence of a building directory when he got there, Brad roamed the corridors until he found a door with a sign that read: COUNTY CORONER. Inside, he smiled pleasantly at a young woman behind the counter.
"I'd like to get a copy of the autopsy findings on the death of Lyle King, please."
The clerk frowned, but said, “Yes, sir, fill this out, please,” and gave Brad a single-sheet form and a pencil. As he proceeded to fill out the form, she left the counter and went to an office near the center of the room. Presently, a small, dapper man in starched shirt and bow tie, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, came up to the counter with the clerk. He waited until Brad had completed the form, then took it from him and carefully perused it.
"Mr. Bradford, you neglected to fill in the line where it asks: Reason for Requesting Report."
"It wasn't neglect,” Brad replied affably. “I purposely left the line blank, since I am under the impression that legally it isn't required for a person to give a reason to acquire a public record. Am I correct in that, sir?"
The little man's lips tightened and he flushed slightly. “The information is for our own internal statistics,” he said primly.
"I see. Well, then.” Brad retrieved the form, wrote “Curiosity” on the line in question, and returned it.
The little man flushed even more and handed the form to his clerk. “There is a one-dollar fee,” he said, and walked back to his office, where he immediately picked up the telephone.
The little man was still talking on the telephone moments later when the clerk gave Brad a carbon copy of the report and wrote him a receip
t for the one-dollar fee.
Leaving the courthouse, Brad returned to his shiny yellow Studebaker Champion and drove half a mile back out of town to an establishment he had passed on the way in: TEMPLE MOTOR COURT, which in addition to its name on the sign also offered CLEAN ROOMS with CEILING FANS and FREE ICE, along with the assurance that it was OWNER-OPERATED.
Checking in with his grip satchel, Brad was given Room Eight (out of a line of twelve), which had a key attached to an inconveniently large metal disk. Inside, Brad found that the room was, indeed, spotlessly clean, had a ceiling fan with a pull chain and a wooden ice bucket on the dresser. After hanging up his extra clothes and setting a flask of factory-made rye whiskey on the nightstand next to the bed, Brad took the ice bucket down to the office, where the owner-operator politely filled it with ice chipped from a twenty-pound block.
Back in Room Eight, Brad removed his seersucker coat and his shoes, loosened his necktie, made himself comfortable sitting up on the bed, poured himself a long drink of rye over ice, and proceeded to read the Yoakum County coroner's report on the death of Lyle King.
The deceased subject was described as an adult male of forty-six years, five feet eleven inches in height, one hundred seventy pounds in weight, and was minus his appendix but had all other internal organs intact. A minor benign tumor had been found on the liver. The stomach contained no undigested food.
The cause of death was determined to have been a single puncture wound to the aorta. The wound was approximately five inches deep and one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, indicating that it had been made by an ice pick or similar instrument, possibly surgical in nature. There was no other damage to the body except a small bruise to the right temple which might or might not have been sustained prior to death.
At death, the victim had been wearing a summer-weight tan business suit, white shirt, brown-and-yellow-striped necktie, brown leather belt with a brass initialed buckle, white undershirt and shorts, tan over-the-calf socks, and brown leather shoes. The suit coat, shirt, and undershirt all bore common puncture holes similar in size and location to the death wound.
Examination of the outer apparel produced nine separate minute samples of miscellaneous lint and one half-inch length of tan thread. The victim's trousers and coat pockets had been examined and found to contain specimens of lint, fuzz, paper waste, tobacco shreds, and minute quantities of dirt. The soles of the victim's shoes were scraped and the resultant residue analyzed as common street and ground dirt with no unique qualities. Scrapings from the victim's fingernails produced minute particles of dirt, traces of hair oil, some slight rubber-cement residue, a particle of dried table mustard, and several minuscule grains of sugar.
Not exactly an exciting coroner's report, Brad thought. Putting the pages aside, he sipped his drink, staring at nothing. One thing, however, did bother him: that single stab wound. In the Memphis crime, to which Edward Bliss had admitted his guilt, there had been five stab wounds. Why, he wondered, would Bliss stab Roy Rayfus five times, and Lyle King only once? It made no sense. Unless—
Maybe—just maybe—Bliss was telling the truth.
In his mind, Brad reviewed the jailhouse visit with Bliss. He realized that Bliss was a very desperate man—and desperate men were liable to say anything to anybody if there was even a remote chance of getting help. So Brad felt it was natural to be sceptical of the accused man's story. Yet now, he realized in retrospect, there had been something about him, something about his eyes, his voice, that Brad could not but feel was sincere. Genuine.
On a hunch, Brad sat up, put on his shoes, slipped the knot of his necktie back up, and picked up his coat. From a little tin, he fingered out four Sen-Sen tablets and popped them into his mouth to cover his whiskey breath.
Then he left the room and drove back uptown.
* * * *
The Yoakum County Library, one block off the town square, was a neat, white-columned little building set back off the street in its own little tree-lined park. As soon as Brad entered, he became aware that it looked and smelled just like the Memphis library, in fact, just like every library he could remember ever having been in: quiet, well-arranged, orderly, yet somehow musty and not quite part of the outside world. There was a plain but pretty woman behind the main desk; in her late thirties, she looked as if she had been there all her life. When she looked up at Brad, it was with raised eyebrows.
"May I help you?"
"Do you keep back issues of the Temple Times?" Brad asked.
"Yes, we do.” Her voice was deeper, huskier, than Brad expected, and the sound of it somehow seemed to change her appearance. “Which date are you interested in?"
"I want to read up on the Lyle King murder and the current trial of his accused killer,” Brad told her.
"I see. Wouldn't you prefer to go through the Jackson Bugle? That's a daily paper in the state capital. I think you'd find much more comprehensive coverage there. Our Temple Times is just a weekly. Most of its coverage has been of a summary nature."
"That's exactly what I want,” Brad said. “A good overall wrap-up of the main facts."
"All right, then.” She rose and said, “Follow me, please."
The woman led him past the main book stacks to a set of stairs going down to a basement. “We keep our newspaper archives down here,” she explained. “It's much cooler and there's less humidity in the summer. The newsprint they use nowadays doesn't hold up well over time. Our library journals tell us that they're working on some method of photographing newspaper pages and running the film through some sort of machine for viewing. That would be a great improvement.” She took Brad downstairs into an appreciably cooler room where there were large bound volumes nearly identical to the ones in the Memphis library.
"Are you a writer of some kind, Mr.—uh—?"
"Lon Bradford. No, I'm a private detective, from Memphis."
"Oh. Goodness. Well—” She smiled a tentative smile. “I've never met a private detective before.” She drew out a chair for him. “You can use this table here. By the way, I'm Hannah Greer, the county librarian.” She pulled out one volume for him, handling its weight easily. “I'll be right upstairs if you need anything."
"Thank you—uh—is it Miss or Mrs.?"
"It's Miss. And you're welcome."
Brad watched her leave. Not a bad-looking woman, he thought. Hanging his seersucker coat on the back of a chair, he sat down and opened the big bound volume to see exactly how the murder case of Lyle King had come about.
* * * *
Brad's research took less than an hour. As Hannah Greer had pointed out, the weekly Temple Times stories, from the time Diane King had discovered her husband's body, up to and including the arrest of Edward Bliss, his arraignment, and trial coverage through the preceding Friday, had been set forth in a reportorial synopsis that read like a textbook. Everything they told him pretty much validated details he had been told by Edward Bliss, or had learned from the coroner's report. There was some supplemental information having to do with the first police responders, crime-scene investigators sent up from Jackson, elementary detective work done, a review of Lyle King's personal and business history in Yoakum County, interviews with people who had known him, his high-society marriage to Jackson debutante Diane Jean Halton, and other items that Brad classified as more or less insignificant.
When he finished reading the stories, Brad returned the big volume to its proper place, retrieved his coat, and headed for the stairs. On the way, he noticed and stopped to look through the open door of a second room, which was furnished with a couch and club chair, end tables, a small refrigerator, coffee table, and radio. In one corner was a worktable with a paper cutter, glue pot, two small vises, scissors, a wooden ruler, and a few other miscellaneous items. In another corner was a book lift to hold stacks of books to be hoisted upstairs via an electric pulley. Between the two corners was a small desk with a chair. On the desk was what looked like a few invoices and a small stack of book-return cards.
/> "That's my little study and workroom, Mr. Bradford."
Brad whirled around at the sound of Hannah Greer's voice. He had not heard her come back downstairs, and she startled him.
"It isn't much,” she continued, “but it's a quiet place to work after hours. I do all the bookbinding and repairs myself. It saves on the library budget, which is inadequate to say the least. What I save allows me to purchase a few extra books."
"I apologize for being nosy,” Brad said contritely. “Part of my nature."
"No apology necessary,” she said, smiling. “I came down to tell you that someone who was checking out a book just told me that there's been a verdict in the King murder trial. Edward Bliss has been found guilty. In the first degree. He'll be sentenced tomorrow. To the electric chair, I imagine."
The news was no surprise to Brad. The only effect it had on him was to tighten the time constraint in which he had to work. He and Hannah Greer locked eyes briefly, as if each wanted to say something more to the other. But neither of them spoke. The moment became somehow uneasy, so they both turned toward the stairs. Brad found himself liking the way she walked up the stairs in front of him. Her legs looked strong, her hips solid and moving just the right distance from side to side with each step. Brad felt a stirring inside him that he had not experienced in a long time.
EQMM, December 2006 Page 4
