EQMM, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  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:

  Dear Mr. Bradford,

  My name is Edward Bliss and I am currently on trial for murder here in Yoakum County, Miss.

  I am innocent of this crime, but the evidence is such that I am certain to be convicted.

  To prove my sincerity in this matter, I hereby confess to you that I am guilty of a killing that took place there in Memphis some years ago. I was acquitted of that crime, even though I was guilty. However, I am not guilty of this one, and I need someone to help me prove it before it is too late and I end up in the Miss. electric chair.

  I read about you in True Detective magazine, about how you helped a man named Billy Clyde get out of prison after being convicted of murder. I need somebody to help me the same way. I have $1,600 in a savings account in the Farmer's Union Bank of Temple and I will pay all of it to you if you will help me.

  Yours sincerely,

  Edward Bliss

  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 droppin
g 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:

  WELCOME

  TO

  YOAKUM COUNTY

  BUTTERBEAN

  CAPITAL OF

  AMERICA

  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. “T
he 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."