Dave’s Bar and Grill-Package Liquor was on Main Street just past the City Hall where Mabel Handel had told him it would be. Rourke found a parking slot just beyond, and glanced at his watch as he strolled back to the entrance. It lacked five minutes of twelve o’clock, but the door was invitingly open and Rourke went in hopefully.
There was a short bar on the left and half a dozen tables in the small room that was partitioned off from the dining room with an archway between the two. At the end of the bar there were shelves of bottled goods with an iron latticework drawn across the front of them and secured with a padlock.
There were no customers, but there was a slight, sandy-haired man wearing a fresh white jacket polishing glasses behind the bar. He looked at Rourke curiously as the reporter seated himself at the far end of the bar, nodded amiably and said, “Morning,” giving an extra flourish to the glass in his hands.
Rourke said sadly, “If it’s still morning I suppose that’s too early to get a drink.”
“Well, sir.” The bartender turned and craned his neck to look up at the big clock behind the bar. The big hand was two minutes short of twelve. “I reckon that clock of mine could be a couple minutes slow. What’s your pleasure?”
“Bourbon. Make it a double shot just to celebrate the beginning of a new day. With a little water but don’t drown it.”
The bartender made his drink, splashing in extra whiskey to give it a good dark color, and set it in front of him. “Stranger in town?”
Rourke took a long experimental drink and smacked his lips. “I’ll probably be sticking around a day or so… on account of that murder you had last night.”
“Terrible thing, wasn’t it? Mighty fine woman. First time anything like that ever happened in Sunray Beach, I can tell you. Gives the town a bad name. Say you’re here on account of it? State police, or like that?”
“Reporter,” Rourke told him. “Miami News. We’re offering a thousand-dollar reward for pertinent information.”
“Is that a fact? Well, I sure hope you get to pay out that reward money, Mister. Man that’d do a thing like that just isn’t human, the way I look at it. I’ll help string him up my own self when they catch him. Some damned hobo, you can be sure of that. Marvin and Ellie Blake was mighty well liked here in Sunray. I guess you might say there wasn’t a better-respected woman in town. Hanging’s too good for a bastard’d do a thing like that. Oughtta string him up by the balls and set a slow fire going underneath him.”
Rourke nodded soberly and said, “It was a mighty nasty thing. Tough on the little girl. The husband, too.”
“It’ll just about finish up old Marv. God! Think about coming home to that. After being off on a convention and all. He just about worshipped the ground his wife and little Sissy walked on, Marv did. I’m telling you I’d hate to be the man to meet that train this afternoon and tell Marv the news.”
“You mean he hasn’t been notified yet?”
“I reckon not. I was talking down the street in the drug store a little while ago and one of the fellows there had just been talking to Ollie Jenson… he’s Chief of Police here… and Ollie said he didn’t see any good in breaking the bad news to him till he had to. Stands to reason there’s nothing Marv can do about it. Bad enough when he does get home and has to find out.”
A party of three men entered the front door and seated themselves on stools. The sandy-haired man bustled to them and took their orders, and Rourke turned his head to watch them idly over the rim of his glass.
As the bartender set drinks in front of them, he leaned forward and spoke rapidly in a low voice, and all three of them turned their heads simultaneously to look at Rourke.
He blandly disregarded their interest, emptied his glass thirstily and set it down. When the bartender approached him again, he said, “I’d like another. Better make it a single this time.”
The bartender set it in front of him and said, “One of those fellows there is Harry Wilsson. He and his wife were about the closest friends the Blakes had in town, and Harry’s taking it mighty hard. Mrs. Wilsson’s the first one Sissy Blake telephoned to this morning after she woke up and found her mamma choked to death in bed, and she went right over there without stopping to get dressed and called the police and Doctor Higgens. They got Sissy at their house now, until Marvin gets back anyhow.”
Rourke took a sip of his drink and glanced at the three men. “Which one is Wilsson?”
“One on this end.”
The man seated nearest to Rourke was in his early thirties, tall and well-built, with carefully-combed, glossy black hair and a somewhat bushy black mustache. He was drinking whiskey, Rourke noted, straight from a shot-glass, with a small beer as a chaser.
Rourke nodded and said, “Thanks.” Then he looked at the still locked supply of bottled liquor at the end of the bar, and asked, “Do you sell stuff by the bottle?”
“To take out, yeh. I just haven’t got around to opening it up yet.”
“Let me have a pint. Four Roses, I guess.”
The bartender got a key from a hook behind him, unlocked the padlock and pushed the iron lattice back. He put a pint bottle in a brown paper sack and set it on the bar beside the reporter.
Rourke slid it into the side pocket of his coat, then got off his stool and with his drink in hand approached Harry Wilsson.
The man jerked around nervously when Rourke stopped beside him and asked, “Mr. Wilsson?”
He had very black eyes and full, almost pouting, lips beneath the heavy mustache. He said, very quickly, “That’s right,” and wet his lips nervously and glanced away.
The reporter said, “My name is Rourke… from the Miami News. I’m in town covering the Blake murder, and I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes.”
“I guess so,” Wilsson said huskily. He gave a little self-conscious laugh that turned out to be more of a snort. “Don’t know what I can tell you, though, except I’m mighty well broken up about it.”
“I understand you were close friends,” Rourke said sympathetically. “Why don’t you bring your drink and let’s go back to a table where we can talk a moment?” He turned and led the way to the farthest table in the rear, and Harry Wilsson followed him, carrying his half-emptied shot-glass in one hand and beer in the other.
Rourke took a chair and Wilsson sat down opposite him, grimacing and shaking his head slowly. “I just can’t get it through my head. I keep thinking about Marvin. How I would feel if a thing like that happened to my wife while I was off raising hell at a convention?” He closed his fingers tightly about his shot-glass, lifted it to his mouth convulsively and tossed off the remainder of the whiskey.
Rourke said sententiously, “It’s always hardest on those who are left behind. Have you got any idea who might have done it, Mr. Wilsson?”
“God, no! How could I? No one who knew them, certainly. Nobody in this town. It had to be a transient. Chief Jenson says he must have got into the house through the front window that was left unlocked. I told Ellie to lock up carefully while Marvin was gone, but she just laughed at me. Nobody does lock up in Sunray, hardly. First time anything like this ever happened.”
“When did you see her last?” Rourke asked smoothly. “I suppose you dropped in and more or less looked after things while her husband was away… being such close friends.”
“Well, Ellie knew she could call on me for anything she needed. But she was pretty independent that way. She stopped by the house yesterday afternoon with Sissy and that was the last time we saw her alive. We talked about Marv being at the convention and all, and I kidded her about how he was probably stepping out on her with some of those fancy city women, and she just kidded right back about how she didn’t worry about Marv in Miami. She didn’t come right out and say it, you know, but she practically said that old Marv knew he had something a lot better waiting for him right there at home than he was going to get from any woman in Miami. And then… oh, God!” Harry Wilsson groaned and spread out his hands and then ran his fingers through his glossy, black hair distractedly. “When you think about last night, and her up in her bedroom and sleeping there naked and dreaming, maybe, about Marv…” He groaned again and put the spread fingers of both hands over his face.
Rourke settled back in his chair and reached down to the paper sack in his coat pocket containing the pint of Four Roses and wriggled the mouth of the sack open in his pocket, and said, “Then that’s the last thing either you or your wife saw of her… when she stopped by your place late yesterday afternoon? Just for the record, I guess maybe that’s the last anyone saw of her alive?”
“I guess so.” Harry Wilsson took his hands away from his face and showed a strained and pain-racked countenance to the reporter. “Except Sissy, of course. And… whoever did it.”
Rourke nodded and emptied his glass. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that more customers had entered the bar and the bartender was busy serving them. He pushed back his chair and got up with his empty glass in his left hand, and said, “I’ll get us a refill. What are you drinking?”
“Bourbon. All right, just a shot. I’ve got plenty of beer.” Rourke nodded and put his right hand over the empty shot-glass on the table. He slid his first two fingers inside the glass and stretched them apart to lift the glass without touching the outside of it, and turned away quickly, transferring the glass to the paper sack inside his pocket and dropping it gently atop the pint of whiskey as he moved toward the end of the bar.
There, he caught the bartender’s attention and pushed his own glass forward, ordering, “Another single with branch water for me, and another slug of straight stuff for Mr. Wilsson.”
He got out his wallet and extracted a twenty while his drink was being made, and he pushed it across the mahogany when his drink and a full shot-glass were placed in front of him. He said, “Take them all out of that… not forgetting the pint,” and he waited to get his change and left a dollar on the bar when he went back and sat down again in front of Harry Wilsson.
He pushed the man’s drink in front of him, and tilted his own glass up. He drank half of it and smacked his lips happily and said, “I never saw her, of course, but they tell me Ellie Blake was quite a piece. What I mean is,” he went on hastily, seeing storm signals in Wilsson’s black eyes, “she was the sort of woman that gave a man ideas about her whether she meant it or not. Which might, in a sense, explain what happened to her last night. Because some man got horny just looking at her.”
“Ellie did have a way about her,” said Wilsson broodingly and uncomfortably. “If a man didn’t know her real well, he might easily get the wrong idea just by watching her walk down the street. But she didn’t mean anything by it. She was just as innocent as the day is long.”
Timothy Rourke shrugged and said, “Some women just can’t help it.” He drained his glass and pushed back his chair and stood up. “Well, thanks a lot for your information, Mr. Wilsson. I’ll probably be seeing you around.”
He walked out, lifting one hand in a wave to the bartender as he passed behind the backs of the men seated at the bar, went down the street outside to his car and got in and drove a block where he made a U-Turn and drove back on Main Street, slowing up in front of City Hall which housed the police department, and looking for a parking space.
At that moment he saw Patrolman Leroy Smith coming down the walk to the street, and he double-parked and leaned out and waved to the young man, and Leroy saw him and hurried to the side of his car and said, “Hi, Mr. Rourke. Something you wanted?”
Rourke unlatched the door and said, “Climb in,” waited until he was inside and then pulled ahead slowly. He said, “I’ve got a little job for you. Where’s your finger-printing equipment?”
“I keep it all at home. I’ve got a little laboratory fixed up there…”
“Which way is home?”
“Just a couple of blocks. Turn to your right at the second corner. Matter of fact, I was going home for a snack. Then I have to go back on duty at headquarters at one. What kind of job, Mr. Rourke?”
Rourke said, “I’ll show you when we get there.” He turned at the indicated corner and Leroy pointed out a neat stucco house in the middle of the block. “Turn in the driveway and stop. We can go in the side entrance.”
The reporter followed him into a small, neat room with a bare porcelain table in the middle of it, a sink with running water, and shelves along one wall holding an array of neatly-labeled jars and bottles.
“I know it doesn’t look like very much,” Leroy said hesitantly, “but I’ve got all my reference books here, and all the equipment I’ve gathered together ever since I studied chemistry in high school. What was it you wanted?” Rourke pulled the paper sack out of the baggy side pocket of his coat and laid it on the table. He took hold of the end of it with the pint inside and lifted it, and the shot-glass rolled out on the porcelain surface.
“I want you to dust that for fingerprints,” he told the young policeman, “and then get your magnifying glass out and we’ll compare what you find with the prints you lifted off that highball glass in the Blake house this morning. A person doesn’t have to be an expert to make that sort of comparison.”
Leroy Smith’s jaw drooped incredulously. “Do you mean you’ve found out who was there last night and had a drink with her?”
“Get out your powder and duster and we’ll see. And be sure you keep it damn well under your hat if I turn out to be right,” grated Rourke. “Just because a man had a drink with her doesn’t mean he strangled her.”