Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

Dead Even by Clark Howard

A multiple EQMM Readers Award winner whose stories are almost always non-series, hardboiled crime tales rather than mysteries, Clark Howard took a different turn when he created P.I. Lon Bradford. Not only was Bradford Mr. Howard’s first fictional P.I. (in a long career), but with this second story we’ll call him a series character — and one who solves mysteries to boot!

Memphis private detective Lon Bradford was sitting in his cubbyhole office, feet up on his secondhand roll-top desk, reading the early edition of the Commercial Appeal, when Elmo Keel, the area’s letter carrier, knocked and walked in with the morning mail.

“ ’Morning, Brad,” said Keel. “Any good news about this weather?”

“ ’Morning, Elmo. Not much. Hot and humid today, hot and humid tonight, hot and humid again tomorrow. Hot and humid forever, I reckon.”

“Well, hell, I guess that’s the price we pay for living in this paradise on the ol’ Mississippi River.” He handed Brad several pieces of mail. “Lots of folks ain’t lucky enough to live on the ol’ muddy Miss and have catfish for supper ever’ evening.”

“You make a good point, Elmo. A steady supply of catfish makes up for a lot of shortcomings in the weather.”

When Elmo left, Brad started slitting open his mail with a switchblade he’d taken off a drunken black man he arrested for disorderly conduct years earlier when he was sheriff in Kennant County, some fifty miles north. Being a Thursday morning, the mail was scant, but Brad was pleased to find a check from Goldsmith’s Department Store for services having to do with an employee in the shoe department who was knocking down on the register. Fellow had a clever way of doing it: Instead of ringing up $10.05 for a pair of $9.95 shoes and the dime sales tax, he’d simply push down the 5-cent key and ring up a nickel. If anybody said anything about it, he’d just say he probably didn’t push down the $10 key hard enough, and he’d correct it by ringing up the ten dollars — which made the cash drawer contents match the white roll of paper in the register that recorded all the sales. But if nobody noticed, then the cash drawer would have an overage of ten bucks — and sometime before closing, the salesman would palm a ten-dollar bill for himself.

That was the kind of work Lon Bradford did: dishonest employees, surveillance, insurance-fraud cases, some divorce work, a little missing-persons stuff, background checks for the West Tennessee Banking Association’s bonding company, and so on. Nothing heavy. A few years back, he’d become involved in a murder case up in Kennant County, as a favor for an old judge who’d been a mentor of his — but that had been an exception. Brad had ended up helping a convicted murderer get out of prison, which had cost him not only the old judge’s friendship, but the good graces of nearly everyone else in Kennant County. He had never gone back.

One of the pieces of mail Brad opened that morning had a return address for the county jail in Temple, Mississippi, the county seat of Yoakum County. From the envelope, Brad removed a single sheet of lined notebook paper. In neatly printed, penciled letters, it read:

This, Brad thought, had to be the damnedest letter he had ever seen. Man says he was acquitted of a killing he did, now might be found guilty of one he didn’t do.

Staring down at his desk, Brad concentrated hard and tried to recall the Edward Bliss murder trial there in Memphis. He pulled up a vague memory of it from back when he’d been so deeply involved in doing what he could to help unjustly convicted murderer Billy Clyde get his sentence commuted to time served. Because Brad himself had been the one to track down Clyde, who was accused of murdering a young Kennant County girl, and had brought him back to Tennessee from Claypool, Texas, he had felt responsible for the disabled World War Two veteran not receiving what Brad considered adequate legal representation at his trial. Little wonder with what was on his mind at that time that he hadn’t paid too much attention to a local murder trial of someone named Edward Bliss.

Best to know who I’m dealing with here, the detective thought, before I decide what to do about this letter.

Taking his feet off the desk, Brad unfolded his lanky frame, took his blue seersucker coat off a hook, locked up his office, and walked down two flights of shiny-worn wooden stairs to the muggy Memphis street outside.

At the Shelby County Library a few blocks away, Brad filled out a form for the reference librarian to look up the murder trial of Edward Bliss. Ten minutes later, the librarian, a spidery little old Southern lady, led him into a musty back room filled with shelves of newspaper-size, leather-bound volumes of past Memphis Commercial Appeals. Pointing to one of the volumes, she declared in what was almost a challenge, “You’ll have to get it down your own self. I cain’t lift these heavy archive books anymore. You can put it on that table there.” She indicated an ancient but obviously sturdy maple reading table. “What you want starts in the October tenth issue. Put it back up on the shelf when you’re finished. Don’t leave it for me to do.”

“Yes, ma’am, I certainly will,” Brad promised. “And thank you kindly for your assistance. You’ve been most helpful. And gracious.”

The spidery little woman grunted audibly and left the room.

Lon Bradford sat down to read.

Edward Bliss had been charged in the homicide of a man named Roy Rayfus, who was married to a woman named Bonnie Lee Rayfus. Bonnie was a manicurist in the barbershop of the Peabody Hotel, where her husband worked as the night desk clerk.

Edward Bliss was a traveling salesman for the Bishop Flower Bulb and Seed Company (“Bishop Bulbs Bloom Best”), out of St. Louis, Missouri. His territory covered a quad-state area whose boundaries were Nashville, Tennessee, on the northeast, Birmingham, Alabama, on the southeast, Little Rock, Arkansas, on the southwest, and Springfield, Missouri, on the northwest. Memphis was about square in the middle of his territory.

Whenever Edward Bliss was in Memphis, where his sales calls usually required four or five days, he stayed at the Peabody Hotel. There he had his hair trimmed in the Peabody barbershop, and had his nails done while he was in the barber chair by the Peabody manicurist, Bonnie Lee Rayfus. Bonnie Lee always wore a starched white blouse-and-skirt set and was in the habit of leaving an extra button undone at the top of her blouse, to encourage tips and other attention. The extra undone button provided Edward Bliss, from his vantage point in the elevated barber chair, with a stellar view of the cleavage between Bonnie’s buoyant breasts, divided yet held together by a gossamer brassiere that featured a small embroidered pink rose where the two cups joined. At some point in time, Edward Bliss began getting a trim and manicure on a daily basis.

The affair between the two, according to court testimony, began during Bonnie’s dinner break (dinner in the South being at midday, with supper being the evening meal). Edward would return to his hotel room and Bonnie would meet him there. Bonnie’s candid testimony at the trial was that their sexual encounters, while not quite on the level of a rapturous experience, were not far from it. Never in her life, she admitted, had she met a man who knew how to do so many things with a woman’s overly abundant breasts. He even named them: Sally and Mabel.

Edward, a bachelor who had always enjoyed playing the field, found himself so smitten with Bonnie Lee Rayfus that he not only began increasing his sales calls in Memphis (in order to extend his stay there), but also ordered a number of lurid, explicit sex manuals from an address in Tijuana, Mexico, just in case there might be some erotic practice (or position) he had overlooked with his — as he now thought of her — “Hot-to-Trot” Bonnie.

On the witness stand, Edward could not recall exactly when he decided that he wanted Bonnie as a life’s companion, and that she must divorce Roy Rayfus. Bonnie, busy enjoying her daily pleasure with all the zest of the healthy young nymphomaniac she was, had not seen that coming. In no way was she interested in divorcing the night desk clerk of one of the South’s premier hotels in order to marry a... a... flower bulb salesman, for Lord’s sake! It wasn’t as if Edward was the first hotel guest she had spent her noon dinner hour with, nor would he likely be the last. In the most solemn and sincere tone she could marshal, she explained to Edward that since she was a saved lifetime member of the Holy Christian Baptist Evangelical Blood of the Lamb Church, and had sworn to cleave to Roy Rayfus until death did them part, divorce was out of the question.

Edward would testify that he was stunned by Bonnie’s position, but that he would never, could never, had never, ever considered murdering Roy Rayfus in order to make Bonnie Lee a widow. Oh, he loved her, was head-over-heels crazy about her, would have done anything for her — anything short of murder, that is. And he swore, under oath, before God and a jury of twelve good Tennessee men, that he knew absolutely nothing about the incident in which Roy Rayfus left his job at midnight one Tuesday and was on the way to his car in the Peabody parking garage when a person or persons unknown had stepped out of the shadows and plunged what the Shelby County coroner had determined to be an ice pick five times into the man’s chest.

Bonnie could not have done it; her alibi was solid: She had, at the time of the killing, been having sexual intercourse on the floor of the projection booth of the Strand Theater. The projectionist had confirmed it; he recalled being between reels of a Tyrone Power movie at the time.

Had it not been for Bonnie Lee’s proclivity for dropping her step-ins at the least encouragement, had she been a poor, grieving widow woman who’d lost the only man she ever loved, the jury might have treated Edward Bliss substantially harsher than it did. But under the circumstances, and considering that the murder weapon had never been found, he was declared not guilty.

After the trial, with her late husband’s insurance money, Bonnie had opened her own manicure and beauty parlor across the street from the Peabody. She called the place Sally and Mabel’s, but would never say why.

Edward Bliss, having been terminated from his job with Bishop Flower Bulb and Seed, simply dropped out of sight.

Two mornings after reading about the Memphis trial, Lon Bradford found himself in Mississippi, driving along Route 51 toward Yoakum County, 150-odd miles south of Memphis. He had not yet sorted out in his mind just why he was driving down there. There was, of course, the sixteen hundred dollars that Edward Bliss had in the Farmers Union Bank of Temple, the Yoakum County town where he was on trial. And there was the sheer pleasure Brad got from taking his 1949 Studebaker Champion coupe out on the highway. The Studebaker was the first brand-new car that Brad had ever owned, and he treated it like a baby. It had wraparound front and rear bumpers, twin spotlights, whitewall tires, a radio, and an electric clock. Its color was bright yellow, and it caught admiring glances everywhere it was driven. Mostly, that was just in Memphis, because Brad seldom had an excuse to leave town. Except on Sunday afternoons, when he would take the car out of a garage he rented near the residential hotel where he lived and drive across the four-lane bridge over the Mississippi River to West Memphis, Arkansas, and back again several times just so people could see him in his bright yellow car. The bridge had opened in 1949, the same year Brad had bought the Studebaker, so he felt the two of them, the car and the bridge, were somehow related.

The real reason, he finally decided, that he was driving south through the rolling hills — interspersed with flat stretches of cotton, rice, and corn fields — of central Mississippi was because of his curiosity about Edward Bliss. What, he wondered, would make a man think that confessing to an earlier murder, which he had committed but of which he had been acquitted, could help get him acquitted of a current murder, of which he said he was innocent? Was it possible that Bliss was innocent of the current charge, and had some way of proving it?

I guess I’ll soon find out, he thought later in the day when he passed a highway sign that read:

The Yoakum County Jail, in the town of Temple, was constructed of quarry rock and had been built in 1863 by Union prisoners of war being held in the nearby Panther Swamp Prison Stockade. Under the rules of armed conflict agreed to by the Union and the Confederacy, prisoners of war were not legally required to perform such labor, but in this case, those that did received an extra ration of supper every day they worked — so the Yoakum County jail got built.

The Yoakum County sheriff, a rail-thin, hawk-faced man wearing both a belt and suspenders, eyed Brad suspiciously. “You say my prisoner sent you a letter askin’ you to come see him?”

“Yes, that’s right, Sheriff.”

“Got the letter with you?”

Hardly able to show the accused man’s confessional letter to the sheriff, Brad replied, “No, I left it with my lawyer back in Memphis. In case I ran into any trouble down here, he could use it to get a federal court order allowing me to see Mr. Bliss.”

“Well, ain’t you a clever one, now,” the sheriff said. He took a ring of keys from a wall peg. “But I ain’t gonna give you no trouble, Mr. Private Detective. No reason to. See, the trial ended yesterday. Jury’s deliberatin’ right now. Your Mr. Bliss is gonna be found guilty, and he’ll be sentenced to the chair, and a week from now he’ll be on his way to the Parchman state pen. Ask me, he’s lucky; he’d a’done this killing eight, nine years ago, he’d a’been hanged for it. Served him right, too, sticking an ice pick in a nice feller like Mr. Lyle King.”

An ice pick, Brad thought. Well, well.

The sheriff led Brad to the rear of the jail, where ten quarry-stone cells stood in a row. In the first cell were two drunk black men sleeping off their binge. The next eight cells were unoccupied. In number ten was Edward Bliss. Putting a wooden stool halfway between that cell and the wall it faced, he told Brad, “Set here. No closer. Understand?”

“I understand, Sheriff. Thank you kindly.”

Grunting audibly, like the spidery little librarian had back in Memphis, the sheriff returned to his office, but left the connecting door open so he could watch Brad.

Edward Bliss was one of those square-jawed, clean-cut, handsome types, with slicked-back straight black hair; the kind of man women were prone to swoon over. He was dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt with the collar open and a print necktie with the knot pulled down a couple of inches. Sitting on the cell bunk, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees, holding a stringy, roll-your-own cigarette in one hand, he looked glumly out at Brad.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, more wearily than challenging.

“Name’s Lon Bradford, from up in Memphis. You wrote me a letter.”

The expression on the prisoner’s face changed at once to surprise, then immediately to joy. He leaped up to the bars.

“Yeah! Yeah, I did! Damn! I wasn’t sure you’d come!” He clapped his hands in excitement. “Brother, am I happy to see you!”

“Don’t be too happy just yet,” Brad said. “Let’s see first if there’s any way I can help you.”

Bliss snatched a checkbook from his back pocket. “I told you about the sixteen hundred dollars, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you told me. Write me a check for a hundred; that’ll cover my time and expenses coming down here—”

“No, listen, Mr. Bradford, you can have it all—”

“I don’t want it all, Bliss. If I can do anything for you, we can discuss an additional fee then.”

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” Bliss took the stub of a pencil from his shirt pocket and wrote the check. He started to pass it through the bars but Brad held up a hand to stop him. “Just slide it across the floor,” he said. Bliss did so, and Brad sat on the stool and picked it up. Then he leaned forward, arms on knees, as Bliss had been sitting in his cell. “Tell me what you’ve got to say.”

Kneeling to put himself at the same level with Brad, Bliss said, “Well, you already know about that mess back in Memphis, right?”

“I know what was reported in the papers.”

“Yeah, well, it was all true, except for my testimony where I said I hadn’t done it. That was a lie. I killed Bonnie Lee’s husband. I mean, I was so crazy in love with that woman that I’d convinced myself that I just had to have her. I knew she’d never leave him; she’d made that clear to me. But I was sure that if he was out of the picture, she’d turn to me. She’d be mine.”

Bliss paused to take a deep breath, then went on.

“I bought an ice pick at a little country store over in Arkansas after I finished my sales calls in Little Rock and was on my way to Memphis. At that point, I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. But after I got back there, back to the Peabody Hotel, and got a manicure, and Bonnie came up to my room, and after we — I mean, after she — after I — well, I just knew then that I could go through with it. I would go through with it, I had to.”

Bliss shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

“I knew her husband quit at midnight. I waited in the hotel parking garage for him, behind his car. When he walked up, I stuck him five times in the chest, real quick, in and out — five times—”

“What did you do with the ice pick?”

“Drove it into a tree in the park down by the waterfront, all the way in, then broke the handle off and threw it as far as I could out into the river.”

“How’d you come to be a suspect in the murder? The newspaper stories weren’t clear about that.”

“Bonnie Lee,” he replied, as if her name left a bad taste in his mouth. “The little slut told the police all about me when they grilled her.”

Standing up, Brad put one foot on the stool and leaned on his knee. “All right, go on.”

Bliss also stood up. “Well, after I was acquitted, Bonnie Lee, she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Told me to keep away from her or she’d have me put in jail. So I left Memphis. Lost my job, of course. Knocked around Little Rock, Birmingham, places I knew pretty well from my old sales route. Worked at whatever job I could get: dishwasher, truck-dock worker, even tried picking cotton; nearly wrecked my back at that. Then one day when I was in Vicksburg, I heard about this feller Lyle King, up here in Temple. Rich feller, cotton trader. He’d just built hisself a big new mansion and was looking for a gardener to landscape the place. Wanted lots of different varieties of flowers, shrubs, ground covering, like that. Since I had all that experience selling flower bulbs and seed for the Bishop Comp’ny, I went up to Temple and applied for the job. Mr. King, he liked the fact that I knew so much about bulbs and seed and such, knew when to plant them, how to cultivate them and such, and he gave me the job. I been working out at his place ever since.” Bliss raised his chin proudly. “I turned out to be a real good landscape gardener. I discovered I had a real talent for the work. Mr. King and me, we hit it off swell. He was real proud of the place, used to give me bonuses all the time—”

“Okay, Bliss, you’ve got a green thumb,” Brad said drily. “Get to the important stuff.”

The prisoner stared off into space for a moment, then said quietly, “It wasn’t long after I started there that Mr. King’s wife, Diane, and I noticed each other. You know what I mean? Really noticed. She was one of those good-looking wealthy women who’s left alone too much of the time. They didn’t have any kids, and Mr. King, he was away a lot, being a cotton broker, traveling all over the South appraising and buying standing crops. The only time he was really around the place was on weekends, and then he seemed to pay more attention to the ground and landscaping than he did to his wife.” Bliss shrugged. “After a while, Diane came to rely more and more on me for companionship during the week. She used to invite me up for a light dinner on the patio around noontime, maybe a cool drink after work, sometimes into the mansion for a quiet supper. Got to where I was spending more time with her than her husband was.” Another shrug before the obvious. “Eventually we started an affair. The woman came to be crazy about me.”

“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 receipt 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.

Back upstairs, Brad thanked the librarian for her help. Hannah Greer returned to her desk as Brad walked toward the door. Before leaving, he looked back. She was watching him. They both smiled slightly. Both of them knew why.

At ten the next morning, Brad rang the doorbell at the King mansion. Diane King herself answered the door. She was a tall, regal woman with perfectly coiffed maize-blond hair and a splendid figure, wearing one of the new pant suits that had recently come into vogue for women.

“Come in, Mr. Bradford,” she said easily. “We’ll talk on the patio. There’s coffee.”

Brad followed her through a richly furnished dining room to a patio laid in deep red Haitian root stone, ringed by a wall of yellow roses.

The east patio, Edward Bliss had said, her favorite side of the mansion... yellow roses... also her favorite...

“Mr. Bradford,” Diane King said as she poured coffee from a silver pot, “the only reason I consented to see you when you telephoned was because you said you had seen Edward and he told you that he believes I murdered my husband. If he told you that much, I’m certain he must have told you a great deal more. Such as the fact that he and I were lovers. Which is true. But I assure you, I had nothing to do with Lyle’s death. My late husband and I had an understanding: He went his way, I went mine.” As she spoke, Brad saw that there was a frankness in her eyes.

“Did your husband know about you and Bliss?” he asked.

Diane King shrugged her elegant shoulders. “Possibly. No, probably.” She smiled tolerantly. “We didn’t discuss our affairs; we weren’t that decadent. But we were usually aware of what the other was doing, at least distantly.”

“Was your husband having an affair with someone at the time he was murdered?”

“Probably. Most likely several someones. He was a ladies’ man.” She smiled again, in amusement this time. “I used to find all those silly little telltale signs that wives notice: makeup smudges on his shirt collar, perfume scents on his shirt and coat. Often it was jasmine fragrance. Jasmine is a cheap, dime-store perfume. Something I never use, of course.”

“Do you know who his most recent mistresses were?”

“No. I never really cared to know.” She sipped her coffee, then said, “Shall we get to the main point of your visit? Not that I have to, but how can I convince you that I did not murder my husband?”

Brad studied her for a long moment, studied the frankness in her eyes. “Just tell me you didn’t,” he finally said.

“All right. I didn’t. Anything else?”

“Why do you suppose Bliss thinks you did?”

Again the amused smile. “Edward is the sort of man who thinks women would kill for him. He was always quite impressed with himself.”

“You must have been impressed, too. He was your lover.”

“One of my lovers, Mr. Bradford,” she said without the slightest unease. She wet her lips. “Just one of them. And not even the best. Just the most convenient.”

Brad sat back and wryly digested that. “I see. You didn’t want to run away with him, then?”

“Heavens, no!”

“Or sue your husband for divorce?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did you ever tell Bliss you wanted to do either? Or lead him to believe you would?”

“Never.”

Brad shook his head. Bliss, you lying bastard.

“Who do you think killed your husband, Mrs. King?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea. Frankly, I didn’t at first think that Edward had done it. Then, when that story about the Memphis killing came up, I didn’t know what to believe.”

“Did that change your mind about the possibility that Bliss might have done it?”

“Well, it certainly gave me pause for thought. But I’m still not sure. I don’t want to think that Edward did it, but it’s difficult for me to draw any other conclusion.”

“What about the mistresses?”

Diane King shook her head. “If I know Lyle, they were just women he toyed with for his own amusement. He had this need for women he could dominate. He couldn’t dominate me, you see. He had to have women he could impress. But I can’t believe there would have been any emotional involvement with any of them of the sort that would lead to violence. Besides, Lyle was killed here on the estate. What would one of his mistresses have been doing here?”

“What about business associates? Did he have any business enemies?”

Again she shook her head. “On the contrary, he was extremely well liked, very popular. Honest as the day is long, in business, anyway. He was a community figure — served on the school board, the road commission, the city council.”

No wonder Bliss was arrested and now convicted so quickly, Brad thought. He finished his coffee and rose. “Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. King.” He was about to offer condolences for her loss, but decided that would have been somewhat inappropriate.

“Not at all,” she replied graciously. “I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I’m totally without conscience. I do regret that Lyle is dead, and I do regret that Edward is in so much trouble. But there’s nothing I can do about either of them, is there?” She smiled, a rather nice smile this time. “And life does go on.”

“It does that, Mrs. King,” Lon Bradford agreed.

This woman, he decided after he left, would not kill for any man.

It was almost noon when Brad got back to town. He went directly to the library. A young library assistant at the desk told him that Miss Greer was downstairs in her workroom. Brad went down and tapped on the open door. Hannah looked up from her desk.

“Oh, hello. Come in. What can I do for the famous private detective today?”

“Famous, I’m not,” Brad said. “But hungry I am. May I take you to dinner?”

She gave him that tentative smile of hers. “I hadn’t really planned to take a break today,” she said, and continued checking invoices and receipts, initialing them, spiking them on an old-fashioned spindle. “I’m afraid I’ve let my paperwork pile up—”

Brad glanced around the little workroom she had fashioned for herself, the little sanctuary from, he guessed, the lonely nights that were the curse of a small-town unmarried woman probably pushing forty. He stepped behind her chair and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Please,” he said. “Look, I just spent some time with Diane King and I need to work her out of my mind with someone like you.”

Hannah paused in her work. “What does that mean, ‘someone like me’?”

“Someone appealing. And decent.”

She looked up over her shoulder at him, an odd, almost puzzled expression on her face. “All right.” She put one more piece of paper on the spindle and stood up. “I know a nice little place out of town, on the river.”

They drove several miles to a little cafe built partly on pilings out over the Yazoo River, and ordered fried catfish sandwiches and a pitcher of iced sun tea. Their table was next to an open wall, and the river slapped lightly against the pilings under them. In a nearby moss tree growing out of the water, a bluejay quarreled noisily and chased some wrens from their limb.

“How long have you been the county librarian?” Brad asked.

“About a hundred years,” Hannah replied wryly. “Seems like, anyway.”

“You must love it.”

“Must I?”

“Do I detect some dissatisfaction with life, Miss Greer?”

Hannah shrugged. “I suppose it’s just life’s rut. That limbo state of mind that most people sooner or later fall into. It’s that state where our lives aren’t good enough for us to be really happy, but not bad enough for us to make a drastic change. It’s a neutral existence where most days are like most other days. There’s no excitement, no challenge, nothing to make your blood rush. It’s a life where you never sweat. You perspire, of course, but you don’t sweat.” Pausing, she looked down at the table for a moment, as if embarrassed. Then, to cover it, she asked, “What did you think of Diane King?”

Brad looked out at the greenish river water. “Shallow. Unhappy. A little lost, maybe. But she didn’t kill her husband.”

Hannah frowned. “Did you think that she had?”

“Edward Bliss says she did.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I wasn’t sure. I had to find out.”

Their food came and they began to eat. Hannah studied Lon Bradford.

“You analyzed Diane King a moment ago,” she said. “Analyze me now.”

“Analyze you?”

“Yes. You’ve already said that I was appealing. And decent. What else have you surmised, Mr. Private Detective?”

“Well, let’s see,” Brad said thoughtfully. “You’re probably a Temple town girl who went to the nearest college you could find, got your degree, then came back home to eventually run the local library. Your parents are probably dead, and I’d guess you live in the same house where you were born. You’ve never married, live alone, probably have two or three cats, and...” His words trailed off.

“Go on,” she said evenly, “finish it.”

Brad remained silent.

“And I’m going to become the town spinster, right? I’m already a dried-up, nearly forty-year-old virgin, is that what you think?” A low fire began to show in her eyes. “Is it?”

Brad looked at her bare arms, at a bed of freckles just below her throat, at the full lower lip that sometimes gave her an artificial pout. He did not answer her.

“Well, let’s see whether we’re right or wrong, shall we? Let’s see just how good a detective you are. Cocktails and supper tonight, at my house. Two hundred South Elm. As soon as it gets dark.” Her words were clearly provocative. And her already throaty voice had become huskier. Brad felt his spine grow warm.

“All right,” he agreed. “Cocktails and supper tonight. Your house. When it gets dark.”

They finished lunch. Brad walked close to her on the way out. He caught a trace of fragrance from her.

“I like your perfume,” he said.

“It isn’t perfume, it’s bath oil, but it lingers. It’s my favorite — jasmine.”

The warmth Brad felt in his spine suddenly turned cold.

Later that afternoon, Brad walked over to the courthouse and sat down on one of several very old public benches that were placed every few yards along the sidewalk that surrounded the building. Slouching down, hands shoved into his pockets, he stared out at nothing and thought about Hannah Greer. Hannah, with her sensuous arms and dusty freckles and almost raspy voice, who had stirred up old feelings in him: warm, liquid feelings, the kind he had frequently known as a much younger man, but had experienced less and less often as he matured and learned more about the underbelly of the world and those who peopled it.

Letting his chin slump down to his chest, Brad mused about how unpredictable life was. He had come to Yoakum County simply out of curiosity about the unusual letter he had received from Edward Bliss. Now he was about to become involved with a lady librarian. And there was no doubt in his mind that there would be an involvement. No doubt in hers, either, he was just as certain about that. When their eyes met over the table in that catfish cafe, they had communicated more in a split instant than some couples do in a lifetime. One fleeting moment and they had registered an intimacy of each other that cried out for fulfillment. A fulfillment that would be consummated that night in her home, her bed, her body.

And the fact that she used jasmine bath oil was nothing more than a coincidence.

Had to be.

After sitting on the bench for an hour, he went back to his room at the motor court to shower and clean up.

And wait until dark.

At ten the next morning, Lon Bradford managed to sit up on the side of his motor-court bed. Eyes red and swollen, his head had a giant pulse in it, and his body felt as if an elevator had dropped on it. He was sure he would never be able to get into a kneeling position again.

It was the absinthe, he remembered. Hannah had prepared it using an absinthe spoon, which was slotted and fit over the top of her crystal absinthe tumblers. Already in the tumblers was a quantity of the green herbal liqueur made from anise, fennel, hyssop, angelica, and the sometimes, in too much quantity, deadly wormwood. It was powerful stuff — “One hundred thirty-six proof,” Hannah had said, smiling. “Think you can handle that, Mr. Bradford?”

“Call me Brad,” he replied. “And I can handle anything that pours.”

He had watched as she put a cube of sugar onto the slotted spoon and slowly dribbled ice water over it until it dissolved and turned the absinthe into a milky greenish-white color.

“This is called louche,” she had told him. “It means ‘clouding.’ First we cloud the absinthe, then we drink the absinthe to cloud our minds.”

Hannah had served ordinary gin martinis before supper, then a 1939 St. Emilion Bordeaux with the succulent baby back ribs, white corn, and fried okra she had prepared for their meal. Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream, hand-churned in a wooden bucket, topped with homemade peach preserves from a Mason jar. It was the best meal Brad had eaten since his own grandmother had died.

It was after supper that the absinthe was brought out.

All during the evening, Hannah had been wearing a flowing Oriental gown of some kind, exotically flowered in greens, golds, and reds. It was obvious when she moved that there was nothing underneath. And during the entire evening, she was barefooted. “I love the feeling of these old wooden floors,” she said. “The soles of my feet are very sensitive.”

Slowly working his way to the bathroom, Brad ran a tub of hot water and soaked in it until he felt the stiffness melting out of his bones. While he soaked, he recalled Hannah Greer’s bedroom. It was a vision in snowy white: walls, cornices, shades, drapes, lamps, even the hardwood floors, which were birch, were all pristine white. Her twelve-foot-square canopied Elizabethan bed had a carved headboard and posts which were all white, inlaid with small white tiles, hung with yards of unseamed white silk. The sheets were fine Egyptian cotton, the feather mattress tight cotton twill, the feather pillows — four of them — silk cased, all in white — everything white. It was like a dream...

Hannah’s body, writhing, twisting, seeming to flow fluidly from position to position, under him, above him, all over him, those marvelous arms of hers entwining him...

All that had seemed like a dream, too. But it wasn’t.

When Brad had convinced himself that he could stand upright, he groped around for his toothbrush and powder, used them for what seemed like a long time, then managed to hold his bone-handled straight razor steady enough to shave, cutting himself only three times in the process, sticking little dabs of toilet paper on each cut to stanch the blood.

He vigorously rubbed Vitalis into his hair, overcoming an insane temptation to taste it.

As he came out of the bathroom, he realized that he was beginning to feel good, trim and lean, back in control of his body. Resisting another “hair of the dog” temptation, he ignored the flask of whiskey in his grip satchel, threw yesterday’s clothes on top of it, dressed in fresh garments, gave his shoes a couple of licks with the motor-court towel, and left the room to check out.

Feeling better every minute, he drove his yellow Studebaker Champion up to the jail and went in to see Edward Bliss.

“Did you find out anything?” Bliss asked eagerly when Brad sat down on the stool outside his cell.

“Yes, I did,” the detective said crisply. “But before I tell you anything, I want answers to a couple of questions. Do you have a wife anywhere? Kids anywhere?”

“No,” Bliss replied, puzzled.

“How about elderly parents that could use some support?”

“No, my folks are dead—”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“Well, I got one sister, Ella Mae, but I ain’t seen her in ten years. She lives up north somewheres — Chicago, Detroit — I’m not sure where.” He looked away, self-consciously. “I don’t have nothing to do with her. She married a Nigra.”

“So there’s nobody you need to help with the fifteen hundred dollars you’ve got left in the bank here?”

“No, nobody. What the hell is this all about, anyway? You going to tell me what you found out or aren’t you?”

“I am. First, write me a check for that fifteen hundred.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

Bliss wrote the check and slid it across the floor, where Brad retrieved it.

“All right,” Brad said. “I found out you’ve been telling me the truth. You didn’t kill Lyle King.”

“I knew it!” Bliss declared triumphantly. “I knew you’d find that out!” He slammed one fist into the palm of his other hand. “It was Diane, wasn’t it?”

“No, Diane didn’t do it, either.”

The prisoner’s exuberance dissolved into a frown. “Well, who the hell did do it, then?”

“I’m not sure,” Brad said.

“Not sure? How the hell is that going to get me out of here?”

“I’m afraid it isn’t.”

“Wait just a minute, now,” Bliss said, suddenly nervous. “They’re getting ready to send me up to death row at Parchman. I’m facing the goddamn electric chair! For something I didn’t do!”

“Well,” Brad said easily, “look at it this way, Bliss. Tell yourself that you’ll be going to the chair for that killing up in Memphis. Tell yourself you’re getting what’s coming to you for murdering that poor Peabody Hotel desk clerk who was unlucky enough to be married to that little slut wife of his you were having so much fun with on the side. You’re actually coming out even, Bliss.”

Edward Bliss stared at Lon Bradford through the cell bars with a vacant expression. “Coming out even?”

“Yeah, Bliss. Dead even.” Brad folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. “Goodbye, Bliss.”

After cashing the check and pocketing fifteen brand-new hundred-dollar bills, Brad drove over to the library. He again found Hannah Greer in her workroom. She looked up and smiled as he came in.

“Good morning, Brad,” she said cheerfully.

“Good morning.”

Hannah stretched luxuriously. “Do you feel as wonderful as I do?”

“I feel pretty good,” Brad admitted.

“Shall we make plans for tonight?”

“No, I won’t be here tonight. I’m going back to Memphis.”

Hannah frowned. “I... don’t understand—”

Brad rubbed his fingers around the glue pot on her worktable, and they picked up dried particles of rubber cement. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails... some slight rubber-cement residue...

He touched a small indented blemish in one corner of the table. Other damage to the body... bruise to the right temple...

Moving around the table, he caught some of the fragrance of Hannah Greer’s still-fresh bath oil. A scent on his shirt and coat... jasmine...

Turning to Hannah’s desk, Brad picked up her old-fashioned spindle with its ice-pick point. “Why did you kill him, Hannah?” he asked quietly.

Hannah Greer sighed a helpless little sigh and shook her head. “I don’t know. He was standing there, getting ready to leave as he had so many countless times before. He had a little smirk on his face that he always seemed to have after he had — used me. That little smirk had always bothered me, but on that particular night he had talked about a mulatto girl he’d bedded down in Copiah County that same morning, bragging that she’d been a virgin, just thirteen years old—” Hannah shook her head again, searching for something that she seemed not to be able to locate in her mind. “I don’t know, I just picked up the spindle and stabbed it all the way into his chest. He started to fall, then he hit his head on the table and kind of staggered back. He actually sat down right in the book lift over there.” She giggled nervously, self-consciously. “I used the lift to move him upstairs. Then I rolled him onto a library cart and pushed him to the back door, where I park my car. I drove him out to his estate and dropped him there.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

“That was as good as any place, I reckon,” Brad said softly. He put the spindle back on her desk.

Hannah’s eyes got teary and she came over to the desk. “I had no idea about that gardener and what happened up in Memphis. It’s been very heavy on my mind.”

“Don’t let it be. Edward Bliss is right where he belongs, you can believe that.”

“Do you have to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Will you take me with you? Please.”

“No. You have to stay here, Hannah. This is where you belong. You have to stay here and live with what you’ve done.”

Hannah moved around the desk. As she did, she picked up the spindle. Brad tensed slightly at the sight of it in her hand. Seeing his reaction, she quickly put it back down. Brad relaxed. Reaching out, he took both her hands in his.

“Know what you ought to do? Go see Diane King. Tell her what you did, and why. I think you two might get along very well, considering the bad experience you’ve both had with men. Invite her to supper. Break out the absinthe. Could be the best thing that ever happened to both of you.”

Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly on the lips.

“Goodbye, Hannah Greer.”

She brushed her tears away. “Goodbye, Mr. Private Detective.”

Minutes later, Brad was in his beloved yellow Studebaker Champion, back on Highway 51, driving north toward the Tennessee state line, and on to Memphis.

Copyright © 2006 Clark Howard