“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: