“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.”