Нэнси Пикард - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

The little man was still talking on the telephone moments later when the clerk gave Brad a carbon copy of the report and wrote him a receipt for the one-dollar fee.

Leaving the courthouse, Brad returned to his shiny yellow Studebaker Champion and drove half a mile back out of town to an establishment he had passed on the way in: TEMPLE MOTOR COURT, which in addition to its name on the sign also offered CLEAN ROOMS with CEILING FANS and FREE ICE, along with the assurance that it was OWNER-OPERATED.

Checking in with his grip satchel, Brad was given Room Eight (out of a line of twelve), which had a key attached to an inconveniently large metal disk. Inside, Brad found that the room was, indeed, spotlessly clean, had a ceiling fan with a pull chain and a wooden ice bucket on the dresser. After hanging up his extra clothes and setting a flask of factory-made rye whiskey on the nightstand next to the bed, Brad took the ice bucket down to the office, where the owner-operator politely filled it with ice chipped from a twenty-pound block.

Back in Room Eight, Brad removed his seersucker coat and his shoes, loosened his necktie, made himself comfortable sitting up on the bed, poured himself a long drink of rye over ice, and proceeded to read the Yoakum County coroner’s report on the death of Lyle King.

The deceased subject was described as an adult male of forty-six years, five feet eleven inches in height, one hundred seventy pounds in weight, and was minus his appendix but had all other internal organs intact. A minor benign tumor had been found on the liver. The stomach contained no undigested food.

The cause of death was determined to have been a single puncture wound to the aorta. The wound was approximately five inches deep and one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, indicating that it had been made by an ice pick or similar instrument, possibly surgical in nature. There was no other damage to the body except a small bruise to the right temple which might or might not have been sustained prior to death.

At death, the victim had been wearing a summer-weight tan business suit, white shirt, brown-and-yellow-striped necktie, brown leather belt with a brass initialed buckle, white undershirt and shorts, tan over-the-calf socks, and brown leather shoes. The suit coat, shirt, and undershirt all bore common puncture holes similar in size and location to the death wound.

Examination of the outer apparel produced nine separate minute samples of miscellaneous lint and one half-inch length of tan thread. The victim’s trousers and coat pockets had been examined and found to contain specimens of lint, fuzz, paper waste, tobacco shreds, and minute quantities of dirt. The soles of the victim’s shoes were scraped and the resultant residue analyzed as common street and ground dirt with no unique qualities. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails produced minute particles of dirt, traces of hair oil, some slight rubber-cement residue, a particle of dried table mustard, and several minuscule grains of sugar.

Not exactly an exciting coroner’s report, Brad thought. Putting the pages aside, he sipped his drink, staring at nothing. One thing, however, did bother him: that single stab wound. In the Memphis crime, to which Edward Bliss had admitted his guilt, there had been five stab wounds. Why, he wondered, would Bliss stab Roy Rayfus five times, and Lyle King only once? It made no sense. Unless—

Maybe — just maybe — Bliss was telling the truth.

In his mind, Brad reviewed the jailhouse visit with Bliss. He realized that Bliss was a very desperate man — and desperate men were liable to say anything to anybody if there was even a remote chance of getting help. So Brad felt it was natural to be sceptical of the accused man’s story. Yet now, he realized in retrospect, there had been something about him, something about his eyes, his voice, that Brad could not but feel was sincere. Genuine.

On a hunch, Brad sat up, put on his shoes, slipped the knot of his necktie back up, and picked up his coat. From a little tin, he fingered out four Sen-Sen tablets and popped them into his mouth to cover his whiskey breath.

Then he left the room and drove back uptown.

The Yoakum County Library, one block off the town square, was a neat, white-columned little building set back off the street in its own little tree-lined park. As soon as Brad entered, he became aware that it looked and smelled just like the Memphis library, in fact, just like every library he could remember ever having been in: quiet, well-arranged, orderly, yet somehow musty and not quite part of the outside world. There was a plain but pretty woman behind the main desk; in her late thirties, she looked as if she had been there all her life. When she looked up at Brad, it was with raised eyebrows.

“May I help you?”

“Do you keep back issues of the Temple Times?” Brad asked.

“Yes, we do.” Her voice was deeper, huskier, than Brad expected, and the sound of it somehow seemed to change her appearance. “Which date are you interested in?”

“I want to read up on the Lyle King murder and the current trial of his accused killer,” Brad told her.

“I see. Wouldn’t you prefer to go through the Jackson Bugle? That’s a daily paper in the state capital. I think you’d find much more comprehensive coverage there. Our Temple Times is just a weekly. Most of its coverage has been of a summary nature.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Brad said. “A good overall wrap-up of the main facts.”

“All right, then.” She rose and said, “Follow me, please.”

The woman led him past the main book stacks to a set of stairs going down to a basement. “We keep our newspaper archives down here,” she explained. “It’s much cooler and there’s less humidity in the summer. The newsprint they use nowadays doesn’t hold up well over time. Our library journals tell us that they’re working on some method of photographing newspaper pages and running the film through some sort of machine for viewing. That would be a great improvement.” She took Brad downstairs into an appreciably cooler room where there were large bound volumes nearly identical to the ones in the Memphis library.

“Are you a writer of some kind, Mr. — uh—?”

“Lon Bradford. No, I’m a private detective, from Memphis.”

“Oh. Goodness. Well—” She smiled a tentative smile. “I’ve never met a private detective before.” She drew out a chair for him. “You can use this table here. By the way, I’m Hannah Greer, the county librarian.” She pulled out one volume for him, handling its weight easily. “I’ll be right upstairs if you need anything.”

“Thank you — uh — is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“It’s Miss. And you’re welcome.”

Brad watched her leave. Not a bad-looking woman, he thought. Hanging his seersucker coat on the back of a chair, he sat down and opened the big bound volume to see exactly how the murder case of Lyle King had come about.

Brad’s research took less than an hour. As Hannah Greer had pointed out, the weekly Temple Times stories, from the time Diane King had discovered her husband’s body, up to and including the arrest of Edward Bliss, his arraignment, and trial coverage through the preceding Friday, had been set forth in a reportorial synopsis that read like a textbook. Everything they told him pretty much validated details he had been told by Edward Bliss, or had learned from the coroner’s report. There was some supplemental information having to do with the first police responders, crime-scene investigators sent up from Jackson, elementary detective work done, a review of Lyle King’s personal and business history in Yoakum County, interviews with people who had known him, his high-society marriage to Jackson debutante Diane Jean Halton, and other items that Brad classified as more or less insignificant.