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.”