bite to eat. And I still had almost two hours before the train, so I thought I’d have a highball first before I ate. And it tasted real good, and I was sort of celebrating because I was feeling so good about coming home ahead of time and surprising Ellie and all… and so I had another one, and I guess maybe another, and then it was getting on toward train time and I’d already spent as much on the drinks as I’d planned to pay for a whole supper, and so I decided I just as well have one more drink and skip the food altogether.”
He shook his head and looked shame-faced at the recollection. “It was a cock-eyed, dam-fool thing to do. I’m not used to drinking much, and I guess they hit me… without any supper and all. I just sort of vaguely remember getting out of there and going on to the station in time to board the train before it pulled out, and I got a seat in the smoker, and I remember putting my return ticket up in the little metal clip on the back of the seat in front of me where the conductor would see it when he came through, and then the train started out and I dozed off.
“I was pretty sleepy, you see,” he added by way of a weak explanation. “Being up all hours at the convention every night when I’m used to getting to bed at ten o’clock at home at the latest. That and the whiskey I’d drunk. So I guess I slept straight through until I woke up suddenly thinking I’d heard somebody call Sunray Beach.
“And there we were stopped at a station and I looked out a window and it looked like the Sunray station, and I heard somebody yelling ‘All aboard’ outside, and I jumped up and grabbed my suitcase and ran back to the door and got off the steps just as the train pulled out.
“And there I stood.” He looked at them blank-faced, seemingly reliving the appalling moment of realization that had come to him. “I saw right away it wasn’t Sunray,” he explained. “It was Moonray Beach instead. The first big town south of here,” he explained to Rourke and Shayne. “About thirty miles down the road. I felt like the biggest kind of fool there is. Standing there in the middle of the night and not another train until this one today. And the liquor I had drunk was dying inside me and I had a headache, and I was just plumb disgusted with myself and everything. I never did feel like such a fool in my life before. And I decided right then and there that the best thing for me to do was spend the night and just catch this train on up here today and say nothing about it to anybody, and so that’s what I did.
“There was a restaurant still open down the street from the station and I walked down there and had a couple of drinks and then got a sandwich, and then I went on up to a hotel that’s only a couple of blocks away and got a room for the night.”
“Haven’t you listened to a radio or talked with anybody all morning?” asked Ollie Jenson incredulously. “I’d think Moonray Beach would be plumb full and bubbling over with a murder right up the road here. Seems mighty funny you didn’t know anything about what happened to Ellie when it went out over the radio at seven o’clock this morning and has been on all the newscasts ever since I guess.”
Marvin hesitated as though trying to make up his mind about something, then shrugged and shook his head. “Tell you the truth, I slept right straight through until just before time to catch the train on up here. Didn’t talk to anybody or hear any news on the radio.”
“From ten-thirty or eleven o’clock last night until three o’clock this afternoon?” Jenson said disbelievingly. “That’s a mighty long time to sleep straight through in a hotel room, Marv. I hope to God you can prove that’s what you did. Don’t you agree with me, Mr. Shayne?” he asked importantly.
The readhead nodded. “I’d like to have the name of the hotel… and the restaurant where you went after getting off the train.”
Marvin rubbed his hand tiredly across his eyes. “It’s the Elite Hotel. Right on Main Street. I don’t know about the restaurant, but it’s right down the street. Oh, hell,” he added miserably, “if you do any checking up you’ll find out anyhow, so I might as well admit it. Just to finish off being a complete damn fool last night, when I finally got to the hotel the liquor I’d drunk in Miami was still churning up inside me and I didn’t feel like I’d ever get to sleep. So I asked the desk clerk if he had a bottle he’d sell me, and he did have one with only a couple of drinks gone from it. So I took that up to my room and poured out about a water-glass full and drank it off straight, and that finished me up, I can tell you. I passed right out cold on the bed and didn’t move a finger until two-thirty this afternoon. Then I went straight to the station and got on the train and came home, and here I am. Now it’s time you did some talking, Ollie. I think I got a right to go see Sissy now.”
Jenson glanced at Shayne, who nodded and said, “I think so, too, Chief. I’ll just check his story as a formality, but I think you’d better go on looking for your transient killer.”
14
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.
