Tommy Zeigler wrote out a sales contract, taking $50 in cash and adding the balance to the Mays account, which was already in arrears.  The linoleum would have to be cut, and Zeigler said it would be ready in about an hour.

*

Tommy Zeigler was busy that day.  Besides waiting on customers at the store, he made a round of deliveries in the morning and another in the afternoon.

This was not unusual.  Tommy Zeigler had been working hard at his parents’ business since he was a teenager, when he pedaled a bicycle through the neighborhoods of West Orange, making collections on store accounts.

To those who knew him casually, including most of the five thousand people in Winter Garden, Tommy Zeigler was a polite and earnest young man who was perhaps too sure of himself.  He was twenty-nine years old, the only child of Beulah and W. T. “Tom” Zeigler, Sr.  Young  Tommy was a conservative Republican and a behind-the-scenes influence in local politics.  Two years before, he had led a successful drive to unseat a longtime town mayor.  Zeigler was a tall and thin (six feet one, about 155 pounds) and severely astigmatic.  He wore thick eyeglasses and kept his hair in an unfashionable brush cut.  He was an active member of the First Baptist Church, the town’s largest.  He detested rock music.  He drove pickup trucks and Oldsmobiles.

He was always in a hurry.  Tommy and Eunice had married on his twenty-first birthday.  He had urged his parents to move the store from its original location in downtown Winter Garden.  He had chosen this new site away from the center of town, about half a block north of State Route 50, the main thoroughfare from the city of Orlando, about twelve miles away.  Tommy had overseen the building’s construction and the move of the business in 1973.  At his urging, the family had bought several apartment buildings during the last few years.  He managed the properties, besides working full-time at the store.

He kept at least five pistols in the store and in his truck, and carried another when he made his cash collections of rent and furniture payments.  At the time, a gang of armed robbers known as the Ski Mask Bandits was active in Central Florida, robbing retail business and often shooting clerks.  Zeigler would testify that his collections totaled thousands of dollars in cash, and that the store kept large sums on hand; the pistols were for protection.

The family’s net worth was over $1 million, and growing.  But it was a quiet fortune.  Tommy and Eunice, and Beulah and Tom, lived in unpretentious ranch-style homes on adjoining lots at Temple Grove Drive, about a mile and a half from the store.  Their clothes, their automobiles, their furnishings tended to be simple and solid.