Alonzo Peters lived alone in a decrepit three-room shack in a creek bottom about ten miles inland from Sunray Beach on a winding dirt road that eventually came out on the other end on State Highway 419. It was a desolate stretch of low, hummocky country, covered mostly with scrub palmetto, that resisted cultivation and yielded little to man’s best efforts to wrest a living from it.
Alonzo Peters had given up making much of an effort many years ago. He did a little fishing in the creek, a little trapping and hunting in and out of season, and he had a couple of acres of cleared-off land where he grew some straggly vegetables when he was of a mind to plant and cultivate them.
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.
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.”
“Do tell? Miz Marvin Blake, I reckon you mean.”
“You know the one I mean.” Alonzo chuckled obscenely. “Don’t tell me you ain’t looked at her walkin’ down the street the way she was always doing.”
“Nuh- uh, Mist Peters. This here colored boy don’t never look at no white women the way you mean. I got troubles enough ’thout that. They know who done it to her?”
“Not yet.” Alonzo sat on the bench and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dust between his feet. “They got detectives from Miami and the State Police and all. I reckon they’ll be around here to your house any time, checkin’ alibis and all. You got one for last night, Pris?”
“Got one what?” The Negro appeared honestly bewildered.
“An alibi. Can you prove where you was at?”
“I was right here to home asleep.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Must I needs to?” Pristine wrinkled his forehead. “I ain’t bin off the place for three days, an’ that’s the truf. My ol’ pick-up is busted down an’ I cain’t even get to town to take in a load to my customers what I promised a delivery yestidy.”
Alonzo said, “Is that a fact? I reckon that’s about all the alibi you need, Pris. How about fetchin’ me a quart?”
“Shuah. I get it from back the shed.”
Pristine Gaylord got up from his end of the bench and strode toward a shed at the rear of the shack which housed his pick-up truck. Alonzo watched him go, and began to shake violently. “A thousand dollars!” he thought, awed. “A thousand goddamn dollars.” He got to his feet slowly, fingering a sharp-bladed knife in his pocket while a devious and delightful and horribly evil plan formed swiftly in his mind.
As soon as Pristine disappeared behind the shed, Alonzo darted forward to his car, drawing the knife from his pocket and opening a long and wickedly pointed blade. The right rear tire was worn almost paper thin, and Alonzo drove the point of the knife into the soft rubber on the side, twisting as it went in.
Air whooshed noisily from the tire and Alonzo hurried back to the bench. He was seated there, dipping forefingers into his sack of Mail Pouch when Pristine returned carrying a Mason jar of moonshine dangling from his big right hand.
Alonzo exchanged a dollar bill for the jar and unscrewed the lid, glancing aside at his car as he did so. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, “Looks like I got a flat tire there.”
Pristine followed his gaze, and both men walked over to look at the flat tire. “Must of just oozed out when I drove up.” Alonzo kicked the flat tire moodily. “Tell you what, Pris. I was jest about to say I’d drive you in town to make that delivery. If you’ll get the jack outta the back and put on the spare, I’ll do it. Me, I’ll set in the shade and have me a drink of corn likker an’ watch you sweat doin’ it,” he added gleefully.
“I shuah will do that, Mist’ Peters,” Pristine grinned back at him. “I’ll have that ol’ tire changed in nothin’ flat.”
Accordingly, Alonzo sat on the bench in the shade and screwed the lid off the Mason jar and tipped it up and drank from the sweetish liquid inside, and presently he was behind the wheel of the Chevvy and rolling in toward Sunray Beach with Pristine Gaylord seated happily beside him and on the floor of the car, behind the front seat, there was a cardboard carton containing twelve Mason jars of shine destined for customers who had expected delivery the preceding day.
And in the locked trunk of the car was a flat tire and a jack and a lug-wrench, and in Alonzo Peters’ mind was the vision of one thousand one-dollar bills fluttering about in front of him, his for the grasping, his for the taking, his to do with as he would.
Alonzo Peters sat very erect, looking from side to side as they entered the town from the west on Main Street, and Pristine stirred uneasily beside him and said, “You best turn to the left next corner, Mist’ Peters. Maybe best if I get off there.”
Alonzo drove straight on across the intersection and headed toward the center of town. He didn’t say anything. He was hunched tightly over the wheel, his face in a concentrated frown. Pristine began to protest again beside him, in a low, hesitant voice, as the Chevvy approached the City Hall and Police headquarters, and Alonzo slowed, seeking a parking space in front.
He swung in sharply, directly in front of City Hall. There, by the grace of God, was Randy Perkins just pulling in to the curb in front of him. Randy Perkins was the grizzled veteran of the Sunray police force who hated niggers and loved to keep them in line. Alonzo jumped out from behind the steering wheel and hurried around the front of the Chevvy to intercept Randy as he got out of his patrol car. He grasped the officer fiercely by the elbow and pulled him around so he confronted Pristine, who still sat in the front seat of the Chevvy.
“You better arrest him quick,” he said harshly to Perkins. “I done brung him in, and this is as far as I kin go. I’m turnin’ him in,” he whispered into the officer’s ear, “fer murdering Miz Blake last night. You better stick him in jail while I go inside and claim the thousand dollar reward they’re offering fer him.”