Brett Halliday - Michael Shaynes' 50th case

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!

But, shucks. Who on the highway would notice a man’s license number? And he hadn’t met anybody after he turned off on the dirt road to home. He was plumb sure he hadn’t.

Now, if he’d just noticed something he could tell them for the reward. He began studying about it hard. But there wasn’t a thing he could think of. If he only could! He could just see himself going in to Chief Ollie Jenson’s office and saying importantly, “I guess I’ll take that reward, Chief. I just happened to be driving through town about midnight last night… on my way home from Delta… and I didn’t think anything about it at the time, not knowing nothing, of course, about Miz Blake then, but I saw…”

Well, what had he seen? What might he have seen that would earn him that reward money? He racked his brains and he couldn’t think of anything at all that sounded the least bit reasonable.

He turned off the radio when the newscast was ended, and got up from his chair. What he needed was a drink of Pristine’s corn.

He went out into the littered side-yard in the hot, late afternoon sunlight and got into his Chevvy, and it made him think of Ellie and Marvin Blake.

He sure felt sorry for that Mr. Blake. He was a right nice fellow for a thing like that to happen to. The radio had told how he had come back on the train from Miami expecting his wife and little girl to meet him at the station. She was a right sweet little girl, that Sissy. Her mama hadn’t allowed her to come out and play in the yard with him when he worked there, and that had irked him some, but he had tried not to be mad at Ellie for that. Mothers were always worrying about keeping their little girls fresh and clean-looking and dressed up.

He drove up the rutted road with the Chevvy taking the bumps and holes so smooth you hardly noticed them, and turned off after about two miles on a narrower track that led down toward the creek and a one-room weathered shanty nestled in a grove of scrub pine. The yard was neat and clean in contrast to his own place, and a hound dog stretched lazily in the shade of one of the trees, and Pristine Gaylord came out onto the porch with a wide smile of welcome on his black face when Alonzo shut off the motor.

The name of Gaylord had come down with the family from slave days, and the boy had been named Pristine by his mother at birth because her white-folks where she did washing were well-educated and she had heard the word used to indicate something new and bright and shining. Well, she allowed her new baby was just about the newest and brightest and shiningest thing there ever was, and she was probably right at the time, but unfortunately he had grown up into a hulking, ape-like sort of man with a big torso that was much too heavy for his spindly legs, and with a broad, flat face that looked forbidding until he smiled.

Pristine was considered simple-minded by those who knew him, although not quite “teched in the head.” It was said about him that he did not know his own strength, and he had spent two long stretches on the chain gang for having badly smashed up opponents of his own race during Saturday free-for-alls when the moonshine had flowed too freely.

Since his latest release, two years previously, Pristine had lived alone in the little shack by the creek, living a happily solitary life and doing whatever drinking he did in the company of his hound dog who was named Franklin D. Roosevelt. He made a little shine and sold it mostly to those who came to his door with a dollar bill to exchange for a quart Mason jar of the white stuff, and he led a quietly uneventful life as behooved a circumspect colored boy who had twice been in trouble with the law.

Now he leaned lazily against a post holding up the porch roof and grinned widely and said in his soft voice, “Good evenin’, Mist Peters, suh. Shoah is hot, ain’t it?”

Alonzo said, “It sure enough is at that.” He got out of his car and slammed the door shut. “You been listening to the radio, Pris?”

“No, suh. I ain’t. I bin down to thuh crik mos’ all the day runnin’ off a li’l batch.” He came down off the porch, moving lightly for his hulk, and moved toward a wooden bench in the shade of the trees which caught any vagrant breeze that might be around.

“Then you ain’t heard about Ellie Blake up in Sunray last night?” said Alonzo eagerly, following him. “She got herself killed in bed, that’s what.”