Brett Halliday: Michael Shaynes' 50th case

He was a short, stubby-bodied man, with thin, sandy hair, a slack, loose-lipped mouth, and watery blue eyes that were set too close together beneath a low forehead.

He didn’t bathe very often and you could tell it by the smell of him on a hot day, and folks circled around him and just tolerated him when he came into Sunray on Saturdays to shop for a few groceries and maybe try to cadge a drink or two at Dave’s Bar on Main Street.

He had been born sixth in a family of thirteen sharecroppers’ children, and five of the litter had succumbed to pellagra and malnutrition and just dry rot before they reached adolescence. Life had not, in fact, offered many opportunities to Alonzo Peters, and he hadn’t done too well with those few that had been offered him. He had squeezed through four years of grade school before he quit and went out into the fields to try and do a day’s work and earn a day’s wages, but by the time he was sixteen he had come to the conclusion that no man ever got very far ahead in life by hard work, and so he had quit trying and just let himself drift.

Despite his unprepossessing background and physical appearance, Alonzo had managed to marry twice (or maybe just once, people weren’t quite sure about that). At least, he’d had two women who came to live with him, and he hadn’t had any better luck with them than with most other things he attempted.

Both of them were mail-order wives. He got them out of a correspondence club catalog, and both came from far away in answer to letters he painstakingly wrote to them. The first from up north, and the second from Kentucky.

The first was about fifteen years ago. She was a big moon-faced and broad-beamed widow-woman, and it was rumored around admiringly that she had brought some little dowry with her. Five hundred dollars in cash, a lot of people said; and some put it higher than that. Alonzo had cleaned himself up for the occasion, all shaved and with a haircut and new shiny shoes, and he’d tightened up most of the rattles in his old Ford when he drove into Sunray to meet her at the train.

People had reckoned it was a fine thing for Alonzo Peters. There was a woman, they figured, who’d take him in hand and make something out of him, if any female could.

And she started right in, too, soon as he got her home to that three-room shack in the creek bottom. There were stories around about how she turned the place inside out and scrubbed the floors and walls and even the ceilings with lye soap, and in no time at all there was a small but neat vegetable garden in the back yard, and half a dozen laying chickens and a rooster, and even a Jersey milk cow that he bought from a neighbor for thirty-two dollars in cash. And Alonzo stayed cleaned up pretty well and shaved two or three times a week, and they said she wouldn’t permit him to chew tobacco inside the house.

But it just didn’t work out somehow. Folks didn’t know exactly what happened because they weren’t much for visiting back and forth, and to tell the truth she wasn’t very friendly towards those who did drop by, she being a Yankee and all, and inclined to look down her nose at them.

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.