Anyhow, Alonzo began to smell again on hot days, and he stopped shaving more than every week or so, and he let it be known finally that she’d just taken off and left him to go back up north. No one saw her go, and he was vague about when and how she’d gone, but they reckoned it wasn’t any of their business to pry into the private affairs of a man and his wife, so nobody pestered him with questions.
And after a year or so, he let it get out that she had divorced him, but nobody ever did see the papers and that’s why there was some talk around about the rights and the wrongs of it when Alonzo snagged another mail-order woman from Kentucky and went up to Delray to meet her off the train and got married to her at the Justice of the Peace there half an hour after she arrived.
But nobody made much of a fuss as to whether it was a legal marriage or not, because this one did seem right for Alonzo; she was a real country-bred woman from the hill-country, and didn’t put on any airs like wearing shoes around the house, and she chewed her own snoose to keep him company with his Mail Pouch.
But Alonzo just wasn’t cut out for luck. Six or eight months later she got bit by a water moccasin down by the creek when she was fishing for suckers one day, and she died on him before he got her into town for treatment.
There were some who said he was mighty lazy and slack about getting her into town, it being the second day after she was bit that she died, but others argued just as strongly that it wasn’t ’Lonzo’s fault because lots of folks got moccasin-bit and you just sucked out the place and slapped a wad of fresh-chewed tobacco on it and the swelling went away and it got all right after a few days.
Anyhow, that was years ago and it looked like Alonzo had given up the idea of having a woman live with him.
He made out all right all alone at his shack, going into town maybe once or twice a week to do a half day’s work, trimming up a hedge or pulling weeds for some of the city folks to get cash money for groceries and his Mail Pouch, and a bottle of shine that he bought off Pristine Gaylord who had a little one-gallon still at his place about two miles up the road from Alonzo.
He had a new car, too, to replace the old rattletrap Ford that he’d kept stuck together with baling wire and spit for fifteen or twenty years. Well, not a new one, but a 1952 Chevvy that he’d traded for at the Ford Agency in Sunray, getting a fifteen-dollar trade-in allowance for his old car and signing a paper to pay ten dollars a month for twenty-four months for the Chevvy.
Some folks had thought Marvin Blake was a fool to trust Alonzo to pay ten dollars every month, but that was before it got around that Alonzo was paying off the debt by working two hours every week at the Blake house, mowing the lawn and cleaning up around the yard.
That had been going on for two months now, and both Marvin Blake and Alonzo were perfectly satisfied with the arrangement.
And that’s why Alonzo was so plumb upset and practically sick to his stomach when he heard the first news about Ellie Blake over the radio at seven o’clock that morning.
She was a mighty fine woman. Always had a smile and a pleasant word for him when she happened to come out the back door when he was working in the yard. And just last week she’d brought him out a can of cold beer and stood and talked to him just as friendly-like while he drank it. And a little breeze had blown up when she turned around and walked back to the kitchen door and he couldn’t help noticing the way it tugged at her light cotton dress and pulled it tight against her butt like she didn’t have on nary a thing underneath the dress. It reminded him of his first wife. The way she had walked with the wind blowing her dress right after they were first married.
Now the radio said she was dead. Strangled in her own bed at night while her husband was away from home and her all alone there with only her little girl. It was enough to make a man puke just to think about it.
Alonzo sat hunched over his radio and listened avidly to every tiny detail. There weren’t many on that first broadcast. Just a recital of the bare facts. They thought it was some hobo. And that he’d maybe got into the house to rob it through that front window that was generally open at the bottom to let a breeze in. They didn’t say whether she was raped or not. They didn’t say whether she had her clothes on or off when they found her.
Alonzo Peters’ pale blue eyes gleamed wetly as he visualized the scene in her upstairs bedroom. They didn’t have to say she was naked. That’s the way he saw her in his mind’s eye. Laying there, humped up on the bed, well-fleshed thighs and buttocks gleaming like ivory in the moonlight.
Was there a moon last night? Yes, there was. More than half full. He remembered how it lay softly on the town when he drove through just before midnight. His heart thudded and he thought back in fright to remember if anyone had seen him, if anyone could place him in Sunray last night.
Suppose they did? Suppose they remembered how he’d been working around the Blake yard recently. Had anyone noticed the way she smiled at him, twitched that butt at him? Did anyone know she had brought him that can of beer last week? If people got to thinking about that… and talking!
But, shucks, there wasn’t a soul in the world knew he’d passed through Sunray last night on his way home from Delta up the coast. There was a back road from Delta that cut off Sunray and saved a couple of miles coming home. He’d say he took that if anybody asked and no one would know he’d driven down the highway instead. Not a light in the whole town that he’d seen. There wasn’t nothing to worry about. They were looking for some bum. Some stranger. The radio said so.
He stayed inside the house all day, close to the radio, twisting the dial for other nearby stations and listening avidly for more details on each succeeding newscast. There weren’t many. Just a rehash of the few known facts. They did say delicately that Ellie Blake had been sexually molested, and it was theorized that the crime had been committed by a sexual maniac. The mere suggestion made him angry.
Hell, a man didn’t have to be a sexual maniac to want a piece like Ellie Blake had been. The way she shook that thing in a man’s face! Tempting him. The way she had tempted him in her backyard that other afternoon. You couldn’t tell him she didn’t know the effect she had on a man, and that she enjoyed doing it. A teaser. That’s what she was. He’d heard that kind of dirty talk about her around town in the past. In a way she had just been asking for what happened to her.
It was on the four o’clock newscast when he heard the startling announcement that the Miami News had offered a thousand-dollar cash reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of Ellie Blake’s murderer. It seemed like they had their star reporter in Sunray covering the case, and they’d hired a high-priced private detective from Miami to come up and look for clues.
Alonzo snorted at this. What could a private detective find? Didn’t the radio say there weren’t any clues? Just somebody passing through town… probably already hundreds of miles away by this time?
But, a thousand-dollar reward. Good God’l’mighty! That was a lot of money. He tried to visualize a thousand dollars and couldn’t. About the most cash he’d ever seen in his life at one time was fifty-sixty dollars, he guessed.
Great day in the morning! What a man could do with a whole thousand dollars in cash. Not much a man couldn’t do with that much money in his pocket. Go to Jacksonville to a high-class hotel and order drinks brought right up to the room, and women, too. Lordy, a man could really have himself a time with a fistful of money like that.
That’d stir things up in Sunray, all right. Plenty of people would sure like to earn that sort of reward. Everybody’d be studying how to get their hands on it. Any nasty little suspicion that anybody had would become important.
It’d start people talking and thinking, all right. If anybody had seen him last night and got to wondering about it… anybody on the highway happened to notice his license number late at night!