Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Rosejoy’s Baby by DeLoris Stanton Forbes

It took the combined strength of the Devil’s Disciple and the Winged Angel to transport the body to its disposal site. After the Devil’s Disciple did the deed, the Winged Angel appeared (too late, yah yah yah, too late) to sigh and cry and suggest the use of the purloined Walgreen’s cart to carry the body the final two hundred fifty yards. She was heavier than the Devil’s Disciple had figured, so now that the deed was done, the Angel agreed to help push. “You’ll get yours, you know,” said the Angel, wings fluttering in agitation. “Oh, shut up,” said the Devil’s Disciple.

The lab report said she died from blunt trauma to the head; otherwise she was a healthy woman in her mid-twenties who was some four months pregnant. The lab said the baby had been a boy. I passed the report to George, who scanned it and grunted. “These babes are always falling for some no-good caveman type. Sooner or later they get knocked up and knocked around. This one got it good.”

The lab said her final resting place — in a stand of bamboo in Big Tree Park — was not the scene of the murder. She’d been transported there after she had been brained with some kind of heavy, blunt instrument. To put it simply, she’d been dumped, fetus and all, in a swamp.

I was standing off the boardwalk, mired at the edge of the bamboo plot. The bamboo was over six feet tall and plentiful; it had formed a bamboo cave, and that’s where the body had been tossed.

I wondered how the perp had known about the bamboo cave. Big Tree Park wasn’t among the most-visited of Fairland’s sightseeing attractions.

“Jeez.” My partner George wasn’t looking where I was looking. “This is some giant tree here. A thirty-five-hundred-year-old bald cypress.” George was reading from a plaque behind a sturdy chain-link fence that encircled the Big Tree. “Some senator named Over-street got the park started in 1927, it says. The tree’s named The Senator in honor of this Over-street guy. And old Cal Coolidge dedicated the park in 1929. Long before I was born.”

“The world was interested in ecology before you were born, George.”

I knelt down in the muck. Big Tree park was in Spring Hammock, a nature park set aside in the twenties to protect fifteen hundred acres of Florida native vegetation. A few years back they’d improved the area, built a boardwalk path over the marshy land through the palms and oaks and palmettos and ferns and magnolias and bamboo. The killer must have carried the body along that boardwalk. A placard told me it was two hundred fifty winding yards into The Senator’s site.

“Jeez.” George was still reading the plaque at the tree. “It’s got lightning rods all over it, and they figure it’s one hundred and twenty-six feet high and forty-seven feet around. That’s some mother of a tree.”

“Just an estimate,” I told him. “Made in 1946. It’s grown since then.”

“It’s alive?”

“Sure. It gets purple flowers at the top in the spring. Kind of like an Easter hat. And there’s a mate just up along the trail. I used to call that one The Senator’s Lady. Are you through sightseeing? I want to get back to the station and talk to the people who found her.” I climbed back over the rail. My shoes were squishy, my socks mucky.

“How come you know so much about this place anyway? I didn’t even know it was here.”

“I lived in the area, used to come here when I was a kid. Played Davy Crockett. Or Daniel Boone. I had a fringed mock-leather jacket, that was Davy, and an ersatz coon-skin cap turned me into Dan’l.” I looked around. “Most times a place looks smaller when you’ve grown up. Funny, though, this one looks bigger. Taller trees, more underbrush. And after today, kind of eerie. Must be thousands of fingerprints along this wooden railing, so dusting is useless. Looking for footprints, ditto. Except back in the bamboo muck. Trouble is, it’s muck. Too soft for footprints, I figure. We’ll have to start from scratch. Who was she? That’s the big question.”

The pair of Greenpeace types had found the dead lady, a male named Alfred Collins and his female companion, one Lucy Pierce. They were talking to a television crew in the station lobby when we got back. “We’re just visiting, you see, from Ohio. I’m from Cincinnati and Lucy’s from Sharonville, but she works where I do in Cincy...”

The TV interviewer was not particularly interested in Cincy or Sharonville. “So tell us how you came across the unidentified body in Big Tree Park?”

“Well,” Lucy jumped in with her answer, “we’re nature lovers, you know, and we heard about this place, and even though it’s kind of out of the way, we finally found it and we walked along — it’s a kind of tropical jungle, you know, a primeval forest. We were looking at all the trees and Alfred saw a pair of owls up in a tree and we were just going along looking up till we got to the Big Tree, The Senator, that’s what it’s named, you know, but just beyond The Senator is this great big stand of bamboo, really tall and lots of it. I was astounded to see bamboo, especially that big, in the middle of Florida. I always thought of bamboo as coming from India or China or someplace like that...”

“So she pointed it out to me,” Alfred said, “and we went closer and I thought I saw something white like a sneaker and I opened my mouth to say hey, somebody lost their sneakers in there, and then Lucy yelped and I saw the rest of the person, too, and we ran as fast as we could back to the caretaker’s, at least we thought it was the caretaker’s but there wasn’t anybody there...”

“Just restrooms,” said Lucy. “But way over on the other side of the parking lot beyond the park perimeter we saw people. There’s what I guess you’d call a flower farm on the other side of the park...”

“Azaleas, that’s their specialty,” explained Alfred, “and gladioli...”

“Well, thank you very much,” said the TV gal, turning off her microphone and signaling “enough” to her cameraman.

I stepped in. “Ms. Pierce, Mr. Collins, I’m Detective Edison, and this is Officer George. If we could have a few words with you...”

“Oh.” Ms. Pierce looked unhappy. “There’s another TV crew waiting outside. We promised...”

“Later,” I said. “We won’t take long.” We might as well have left them at it. The story they told us had by now been told so often it was almost a standard speech. We got their local address and told them to stay put for a couple of days. We were through with them unless it tinned out they had anything to do with the death of Ms. X. I gave them a doubtful with a capital D.

The lab had estimated the time of death to be about sixteen hours before discovery. The crime crew had nosed around the bamboo, the boardwalk, and the rest of the area and had taken pictures of the crime scene before they allowed the body to be taken away. In addition to the pregnancy, the interim lab report revealed that the victim wore a dental bridge with four teeth. Somewhere a dentist knew the name of the lady, so that would give us a handle on who she was and that was a lucky break because the odds of a woman that young having false teeth were slim indeed. Meanwhile the flower people, as the Ohio couple had termed them, were being formally questioned in an interrogation room. We listened in.

The Reston family had been operating a nursery on Big Tree Road for as long as I could recall. I remembered a tall, somehow ominous Mr. Reston from my youth. He had given me the eye when I went down the road in my Crockett getup. Solid citizens from way back, they probably had nothing to do with the crime — the Reston duo, a man and woman, swore they knew absolutely nothing about the body — but what with proximity you never know.

I made a mental note to drop by their place later to buy some azaleas. I reckoned I could put them in pots on my apartment porch. Chances were they wouldn’t like it there, but as I said before, you never know and it’s my theory that people talk more comfortably when they’re selling azaleas in their own environment. Police stations can be intimidating even for the totally innocent. Which the Restons, brother and sister, probably were. But you never know.

The Devil’s Disciple looked round the kitchen once more. No traces of blood, no signs of the struggle that had resulted in the doing of a deed that the Winged Angel had deplored. Sooner or later, the Disciple figured, they’d discover the identity of the corpse (She was dead, hooray, hooray! Out of the way forever!), and sooner or later the connection would be made and the questioning would come. “Where were you? Any witnesses? Not what I’d call a solid alibi.” No matter, there’d be no clue, nothing could be proved, and the Winged Angel surely wouldn’t confess, that would be aiding and abetting...

The crime lab hit it; the dental plate with the four teeth produced an identity. The murder victim was named Rosejoy Precious, an appellation that caused George to speculate that she must have been a topless dancer from one of the next town’s porn clubs, but he was dead wrong there. She’d been a secretary, a very good secretary according to her employer, one H. Dietrich Fenster, Esquire.

When I was a little kid, H. Diet-rich Fenster had been more than an esquire, he had been a county commissioner and even a candidate for mayor of Fairland, an election he’d lost by one hundred and three votes when his opponent accused him of being an atheist because he had no church affiliation. My father had been his campaign manager. The political defeat took all the starch out of Fenster, so said my father, so he got out of government and stuck to lawyering, a profession he still pursued. “Too bad about the election,” my father’d said. “He’d have been a hell of a good mayor.” My mother had said, “I don’t know, Harry. Is he really an atheist?” “No more than I am,” said my father, and that left me totally confused because I couldn’t remember my father’s ever going to church, not once in all the years I lived at home. Later on, of course, I learned that not going to church didn’t make you an atheist any more than being a Catholic instead of a Baptist or a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Shinto or a Baiha’i or any of those other well-intentioned beliefs meant you were headed for hell. But my mother wouldn’t have bought that. She was baptized a Southern Baptist, and that was that forever and ever, amen.

Anyway, back to H. Dietrich Fenster. I don’t think anyone knew exactly how old he was, but he was still active in the legal business and once in awhile you’d read about him in the papers when he’d been involved in some bizarre case or another. He still had law offices in Fairland’s original bank building on First Street, and that’s where we went to interview him.

“Ms. Precious!” exclaimed Fenster. “Good God.”

“I guess you’ll miss her,” George snickered. “She must have been pretty good to look at before the perp rearranged her face. Probably didn’t matter much how fast she could type.”

Fenster pursed his mouth. “We don’t use typewriters any more, young man. This is the computer age, and Ms. Precious was an expert. Tell me what happened. You say she was found in Big Tree Park?”

I recounted the discovery. “We just made the I.D. through her dentist. But all we know about her is her name and that she told Dr. Edwards you’d recommended him. The address she gave turned out to be a previous address; the apartment manager said she moved out at the end of last year. Seems like you can fill us in, Mr. Fenster. Where does — did she live now?”

Fenster got out of his swivel leather chair, paced. “She moved back in with her mother. She was concerned about her mother; she thought if she moved back she could watch out for her.” Fenster might be old, but he paced like a young man.

“Her mother is sick? What’s wrong with her?” George had his pen poised on his notebook.

“If you call it a sickness, I guess she was. Her mother was enamored of a young man. Ms. Precious considered him a gigolo.”

“Ms. Precious’s father is deceased?” I asked. Ms. Precious was in her mid-twenties; that would make her mother close to fifty one way or another, kind of in my ballpark. Early for death this day and age, assuming that the father was in the same age bracket.

“No, her mother divorced him. As a matter of fact, I handled the legal work for Ms. Precious’s mother. We did rather nicely in the financial division, and Ms. Precious managed to separate her mother from the would-be Romeo, so it seemed to me that her troubles were over.” He clicked his tongue. “This is terrible, truly terrible.”

“Was the Romeo responsible for the dental problem?” I asked.

Fenster gave me a quick glance. “She never said so — Ms. Precious was reticent about personal matters — but I understand she had some sort of a confrontation with him. I offered to represent her in a harassment suit, but she refused. Ms. Precious was quite shy. Very astute of you, young man. What did you say your name was?”

“I’m Ben Edison. I believe you knew my father.”

“Edison? I certainly did. So you are his son Ben? I recall they nicknamed you Genius for some reason or another. Your dad’s running airboats down around Okeechobee, I hear. That’s Sam’s way, all right. He always went against the tide. Running airboats when he should be up there in Tallahassee running the state.”

The thought made me smile. “I reckon he’d turn Florida upside-down. My mother, bless her soul, called him a maverick.”

Fenster shook his head of thick silver hair. “Too bad she had to leave you. That cancer is a pure devil disease. But enough reminiscing, young Edison. You’ll want Ms. Precious’s address and maybe her father’s and the name of the Romeo and all such. And you’ll want to go through her desk, I wager.” He shook his head again. “I almost called for Ms. Precious to give you the details, but I guess I’ll have to do it myself.” More headshaking. “A terrible thing, terrible.”

Ms. Precious’s desk was nasty-neat. Everything in it pertained to Fenster’s legal affairs so far as I could tell at a glance, but there was something stuck in the back of the bottom file drawer, some kind of plastic bag. Dillard’s was the name of the store supplying the bag, and inside we found some tiny shirts, a pair of bootees, and a soft yellow blanket, a pathetic collection for a baby who never lived. George was touched. “The bastard,” he muttered. I took it that he didn’t refer to the baby.

There was something else in the back of the filing cabinet, a book. The front of it identified the volume as My Diary, and on the flyleaf she had written DIARY OF ROSEJOY PRECIOUS. THIS IS MY BOOK. I once had a girlfriend who kept a diary. She wrote faithfully in it for about a week, then it began to peter off, but Rosejoy Precious was faithful to her diary. I skimmed to the last page, dated the day before she died. I felt as though I’d come upon a pot of gold beneath a thundercloud.

The last entry read, “I have wonderful news, Diary, but I won’t let you in on the secret until it really comes true — I might jinx myself. But I will say this, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of my life! Like Edgar Allan Poe wrote, ‘And all my days are trances, and all my nightly dreams are where thy grey eye glances, and where thy footstep gleams — in what ethereal dances, by what eternal streams....’ Oh my dear diary, I can hardly wait!”

“I don’t get it,” said George. “What’s Edgar Allan Poe got to do with—”

“I’m taking these items as probable evidence, Mr. Fenster. I’ll sign for them.” To George I wondered aloud, “Grey eyes? Did she mean that literally?”

“Grey eyes? Oh, I get it. The guy, whoever he is, has grey eyes. And she was expecting a proposal.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Could be. You never know.”

According to the obituary, services for Ms. Rosejoy Precious will be held at Saint Mary’s by the Lake Church at two P.M., followed by interment at Blessed Angels Memorial Gardens. Well, well, they made the connection sooner than I expected... well, well. It would be fun to attend her funeral. I suppose I’ll find the Winged Angel sitting in the front pew...

Ms. Precious’s mother was, in George’s words, a dish. Fiona Precious was indeed most attractive, a slender lady with a fine-boned face and a cascade of silky blonde hair. Of course, we weren’t seeing her at her best; she’d been crying, and her nose was red and the almost platinum hair disarrayed.

The first thing she said to us was, “Jeffrey. Jeffrey Wilson. I tried to tell her...” And she began to tear up again.

“Now, now, Fiona.” The fairhaired young man sitting next to her in the front pew pawed at her shoulder and proffered a fresh tissue. I dubbed him Cornell Eps, Fiona’s past and probably reinstated in-time-of-stress liaison. He looked, I thought, like a cruder version of the film heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. George thought he looked more like Johnny Depp.

“What about Jeffrey Wilson?” I wanted to know. People were filing in and my questions came at the wrong time in the wrong place, but in my business you take what you can get.

“I never knew what she saw in that man,” said Fiona through a handful of tissue. “He struck her, you know. She said it was an accident, but I said if they do it once they’ll do it again.”

“Where can we find this Jeffrey Wilson?”

She took the tissue away from her eyes and scowled. “The nerve! Look, Cornell, he’s come to the funeral. There he is, officer, just coming in the door. That’s Jeffrey Wilson.”

“Now that one,” murmured George, “is a piece of work.”

Jeffrey Wilson had a shining head, completely bald, shaven I guessed, there wasn’t a blemish on it. He wore a suit with vest; the color was navy verging on purple. His eyes were striking, an unusual shade of blue, almost lilac. He used them now to case the mourners. They flicked past George and me, and I had the idea that he tagged us right off. He had someone with him, a leggy young woman wearing black tights and a knee-length, black V-necked top. They came tentatively into the church and found seats at the rear. She whispered something, he nodded. Fenster came in then, noted the couple and came on by. “Guess we didn’t do a good extermination,” he said softly, nodding at Eps and Mrs. Precious.

I wanted to ask him about the Wilson character, but we couldn’t talk now. The preacher, minister, whatever — the sign outside identified him as Pastor J. J. Favorsham — appeared in the pulpit. George groaned. He’d often said how he hated funerals; he’d shut his ears and think of bowling consecutive strikes until he had a perfect game, that was his formula for funeral survival. I had no such fantasy to fall back on, so I listened and watched. I hoped the reverend was for tearjerkers. I’d found you could sometimes learn a lot from people’s reactions to heartrending phrases. But all I came up with was that Fiona took her daughter’s death hard.

When the ceremony was over and the casket had been wheeled down the aisle, funeral attendants walked the mother and her friend out before we were permitted to follow. By the time we got outside, the Wilson man had disappeared. The grieving mother and her escort got into the car behind the hearse; the other funeral attendees made their way to their cars. Among their ranks I noted the Restons, but most of the people were strangers to me.

When the cemetery procession began, George and I pulled away, headed for Fiona Precious’s residence. We needed to talk to her and to look over Rosejoy’s possessions, so we went to wait. A lousy time to show up among the funeral guests, but as I said to George, “ ‘Art is long, and Time is fleeting, and our hearts, though stout and brave, still, like muffled drums, are beating funeral marches to the grave.’ ” In response to his incredulous look I added, “That’s Longfellow. I can quote with the best of them.”

“Huh!” said George. “So can I. ‘Once there was an elephant who tried to use the telephant— No! No! I mean an elephone who tried to use the telephone.’ ”

“George,” I said truthfully, “at times you amaze me. Who said that?”

He looked smug. “My mother.”

Fiona was face-deep in tissues when they arrived. I took it that the actual interment had been especially hard on her.

We followed them up to the house. Eps, who was propping her up, three women I didn’t know, and the Reverend Favorsham were murmuring soothing words as they went in. The reverend almost shut the door on us, and when I politely pushed my way in, he looked as though he wished he had.

“Not now,” he said. “No interviews now.”

I showed him my I.D., and he backed off with a scowl. “I hardly think this is the time...”

“There is never a time,” I told him.

“It’s all right,” Fiona Precious interceded for us. “They’re trying to find out who—”

“To quote the Good Book, there is no rest for the weary,” intoned Cornell Eps with a pious glare.

“I think that’s no rest for the wicked,” said George with a smirk.

Actually, it’s no peace for the wicked. “We would like to see your daughter’s room, Mrs. Precious. If you’d accompany us?”

Rosejoy’s room was a little girl’s room: canopied bed, ruffled curtains, and all. I suspected it had been that way since her childhood, never changed even after she’d left the nest. Her clothes hung in perfect alignment in the model closet, her shoes in shoe-rack pockets, her handbags and belts on hooks. “I’d guess you never had a messy-room problem with this one,” I said over my shoulder.

“Rosejoy was a perfectionist,” her mother told me. Her eyes were sea-colored, like opal.

“Wasn’t that occasionally inconvenient?”

She didn’t waver, and for once her eyes were dry. “Sometimes,” amended that to, “not really. Perfectionists can be demanding, but Rosejoy was an angelic child. One year she was poster girl for the United Way. See, there’s a copy behind her bed. The canopy kind of hides it, but you can see Rosejoy was the very picture of a little princess.” She broke down once more. “Oh my beautiful child! How could this happen? You must bring her killer to justice!”

“We’ll do our best.” George’s expression was a mixture of grown man embarrassment and little boy sincerity. I went on with my look-see.

Rosejoy had a French provincial desk, all gold and white. It held stationery and stamps in a brass holder and a set of pens in a porcelain hold-all, a bill from Dillard’s for twenty-eight ninety-nine, and a receipt for gas from a Texaco station. I said, “Her car? Is it here?”

“Yes.” With one final sniff Fiona recovered her composure. “It’s the dark blue Toyota in the garage. Next to my Dodge. Wherever she went that last day, she didn’t drive. Someone must have picked her up.” She settled herself in the chair that faced the desk, began to open drawers. “I really don’t know what she kept in here. I never spied on my daughter.” She glanced up. “I trusted her completely.”

“Nobody saw her leave? When did you see her last? Where were you?”

“The day — the afternoon of the day — it happened, she came home from work, said she was going out and she had to change. I asked her where, but she didn’t answer; I guess she didn’t hear me. I was going out myself. I was due at my bridge club, so I left without speaking to her again.” She sighed deeply, more tears formed. “I don’t think I’ll ever play bridge again.”

I put my question again. “Did anyone see her leave? One of your neighbors? Anybody?”

Head down, she said, “No one. We have only two sets of immediate neighbors, and they’re in and out, work and play and all that. They’re what the papers call yuppies. I couldn’t find anyone who saw her. The other policeman, a lieutenant?, didn’t have any luck either. It was almost like she was invisible.”

Cornell Eps appeared in the doorway. “Fiona, your friends are asking for you.”

She pulled herself together, asked us, “Is that all?”

“Go ahead,” said George, but I had one last question. “What did she do for fun? What were her hobbies?”

“Hobbies?” Fiona looked blank. “I don’t think she — well, she did volunteer work at the church, in the pastor’s office. And she puttered around in the back garden; she liked flowers. And tomatoes. Last year she nurtured four tomato plants, actually produced some fruit. She read a lot, spent time at the library, and she enjoyed the mall. She used to say she got her exercise shopping at the mall. I guess those were her hobbies.”

“Fiona?” said Eps.

“We’ll get back to you if we need you. Thanks,” I said and watched her go. Early on I’d decided there must be a cop smell, some kind of aura, a dark shadow, something ugly; everybody always seems eager to get away.

Paul Reston, Jr., was mixing compost with potting soil when I found him. He’d told Lieutenant Gross that he’d been out of town the night Ms. Precious’s body was junked. A big plant show in Atlanta — he’d gone to pick up some exotic species. “More and more we’re getting calls for exotics,” he told me. “It’s all these Yankees coming down here. They think we can grow anything in Florida.”

“Maybe they can,” I said, “but I can’t. Tell me, can I grow azaleas in pots? I haven’t got much yard where I live.”

He straightened up. He must have been a third generation flower-growing Reston; a tall man, taller than I and I’m not short, he gave the impression he was looking down on me. “The azalea’s a member of the rhododendron family, you know; that’s why it does so well north of us in the Carolinas. They don’t sink deep roots, so pot growing’s been done — whether a plant makes it or not depends on how the plant likes its location, that’s the way I look at it. You want to try it, be my guest. It might help if you have a good-sized pot, not necessarily deep. Get some azalea food, follow the instructions, and have at it. You don’t have to be a magician to grow stuff; all you’ve got to do is pay attention. That’s the way I look at it.”

“Got any tomato plants?”

“It’s the wrong time of the year — some people can have a winter crop, but it’s tricky.”

“I don’t reckon you recall selling some plants last year to Rosejoy Precious? The girl we found in the park?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know as I ever met her. Maybe it was Pauline. My sister. She might recall.”

I indicated a couple of azaleas. “I reckon I’ll take these two. You keep some kind of security around at night, you must. We have had a bunch of cases of plantnapping in the Fairland area. Some character could bring a truck in here and sell the lot out on Route I-95 without anybody knowing.”

Reston grinned. He was growing a mustache; it was still kind of hit-and-miss. “Come up to the house with me, I’ll show you our security. Their names are Pete and Repeat.”

Pete and Repeat were big and black with fang teeth, a handsome looking pair of Doberman pinschers in a roomy cage. They came up to Reston, licked his hand through the chain-link, backed off, and growled at me. “We let ’em roam at night,” he explained. “We haven’t had any problems.”

“So there’d be nobody around at night — on two feet,” I mused.

“Not if they know what’s good for them.”

“But the dogs don’t go over into the park?”

“We’re fenced, the park’s fenced, and the dogs are trained. Can I sell you a bag of azalea food? How about some bone meal and potting soil? Have you got pots for your plants, we’ve got a pretty good selection...”

The Devil’s Disciple had warned the Winged Angel, “They’ll be calling on us sooner or later, you know. So don’t do anything stupid.”

The Winged Angel looked worried. “You know I’m not good at lying. Remember in grade school, you beat up the Higgins kid, and I was supposed to be your alibi. Mr. Jostyn hadn’t had me in his office five minutes before I ratted on you.”

“Yes, and you’re still paying for it, aren’t you? You’re my slave because you’ve got no character. Angels are supposed to have character and you’re a gutless wonder, so foul up again and I’ll delete you completely, you got that? You’ll cease to exist. There’ll be no saving you this time.”

“I’ll try,” whimpered the Angel. “What do you want me to say?”

George had news for me.

“Something funny’s been going on,” he reported. “You remember those guys, Eps and Wilson? Well, turns out they live in the same apartment complex. Two different streets, back-to-back buildings. What do you think the chances are that they knew each other before they began going after mother and daughter? Male gold-diggers, something like that?”

“Could be they didn’t,” I decided. “I don’t know all the people in my own building.”

“Yeah, but could be they did. The complex comes complete with pool and gym, they could have mixed and mingled. What do you think?”

“I think it’s about time we had a little get-together with the fellas. Want to toss a coin, who gets Wilson, who takes Eps?”

I won Eps, if win is the right word. Cornell Eps was the fairhaired boy I’m told women dream about, tall, muscular, good teeth, and dimpled chin. I could see, almost, why Fiona Precious fell for him. Eps, I reckoned was from Alabama. All of us Southerners come equipped with accents, but his was more pronounced than most.

Turned out I was right. He hailed from “Birmin’ham. Born and raised there. Came down here when y’all got to needin’ skilled folks, on account of Mr. Disney. My for-tay is hairdressin’. I’ve won national prizes in hairdressin’. I got me a big followin’ in hairdressing, that’s how I met Ms. Fiona Precious. I feel so real sad for Ms. Precious, losin’ her daughter that way. And I understand the poor little thing was p.g. Isn’t that the absolute pits? Whoever did that awful thing ought to be tarred and feathered before they hang him, that’s what my daddy would have done if it had been his daughter. ’Course, my daddy was an old fashioned Southern gentleman.”

Cornell had been busy the evening that Rosejoy met her tragic end, that’s the way he put it.

“I got this big following, you see, and some of my clients are so busy they cain’t come in in the day so I do them the courtesy of goin’ to their homes at night. That night — you said it was Saturday — I was giving Ms. Florence Henderson a perm. No, she’s not the actress, although I do the hair of many famous actresses. My Ms. Henderson is an elderly lady who has trouble gettin’ around. Here’s her phone number and address if you want to call her. She’ll tell you that her dear friend Cornell was right there shampooin’ and permin’ and blowdryin’ till the cows came home. I tell you that just in case — though I can’t imagine why you should — you had any idea that Cornell had anythin’ at all to do with the demise of Ms. Rosejoy Precious. Isn’t that just about the dearest name you ever heard? I told Fiona it was proof positive that she has this wonderful sense of the romantic...”

Cornell Eps’ eyes were as blue as the Florida skies. Bright blue. Without a cloud.

Jeffrey Wilson’s alibi was a night out with the lads as he put it. He named three buddies who had accompanied him to the Planet Hollywood cafe on the night in question.

George had zeroed in on his relationship with Rosejoy. “He answered funny,” said George. “Like he hardly knew her at all. He’s this weird looking guy, you know, with the shaved head and earrings, but big, a really big guy. I’d guess about six two, two twenty, something like that, maybe more. He’s gonna have a weight problem later on, I figure, soon as he stops going to the gym every day. He said that’s where he met Eps. Doesn’t know him real well, he said, but he does run into him at the gym.

“Anyway, according to him, he only went out with Rosejoy twice, once to dinner and another time she dragged him to Shakespeare in the Park. The way he talked, he sounded like he was bored out of his skull with Ms. Precious, so I asked him who the gal was he brought to the funeral and he said she’s his steady now, name’s Ellie. Ellie Bevans, got her address here plus the buddies’ numbers. I don’t know, Edison, but I don’t feel it. He impresses me as a swinger, and from what I hear of our Ms. Precious, I don’t figure she was.”

“Maybe not, but she managed to get herself pregnant. Did you ask him about the assault that cost her her teeth? What did he say to that?”

“He looked me straight in the eye and said no way, he never laid a hand on her. He said he’s got a temper, all right, but he’s gotta feel passionate about something before hell start swinging. That’s the word he used, passionate. To tell you the truth, Ben, I don’t think she was his type. Like I said, he’s a swinger. Want me to pay a call on this Ellie Bevans? Or will you take it?”

“You, I guess. I’ve got some other fish to fry. What color were his eyes?”

“His eyes? Oh yeah, that grey business. Web, his eyes aren’t grey, no way. They’re blue — dark blue, more like purple. They say Liz Taylor’s eyes are purple; so are Wilson’s. Like I say, I don’t figure he’s our boy. Maybe Eps?”

I shook my head. “I’ve a hunch that Ms. Florence Henderson will check out as advertised. Cornell is — I figure Fiona Precious latched onto him because he’s safe, if you know what I mean.”

“Safe?”

“On the gay side. Women like gay men; they’re usually bright and charming and no problem in the bedroom department. Fenster said Rosejoy was concerned about her mother’s attachment to Cornell. I don’t think she should have given it much worry time. Maybe Fiona didn’t know. If she didn’t, she was double naive. Wilson would have gotten the message. You figure that’s his bag, too?”

George shook his head. “No way. So now what? Who’s next?”

“Back to square one. The lab got a DNA sample of the fetus. When we connect the killer to the crime, a match will help to cinch it. But first we need another DNA to make the comparison, and we can’t get that until we’ve made some kind of a case — that’s our catch twenty-two.”

At suppertime I microwaved a Stouffer’s chicken special and opened the diary. It had been burning a hole in my pocket all day.

She’d begun it in January on New Year’s Day. She’d been to a New Year’s Eve party, she said, a party sponsored by the Fairland Historical Society. She’d gone alone — “Jeffrey hasn’t called in weeks. I guess I’m not his type, but I don’t care. I don’t think he’s my type either. I thought when I met him that he was exciting, but he’s not. He’s trying to look exciting, he manages that, but inside he’s just ignorant. And crude. My mother was right.”

She’d met some people at the party. She mentioned a man who was writing a book about old Fair-land and another man who had asked her to dance. (“He’s a really good slow dancer; slow dancing is nice.”) A husband and wife pair of ecologists were worth noting by name (“Heath and Beverly Porter, they’ve moved up here from the Miami area”) as was Eddie Armstrong, an attorney who thought H. Dietrich Fenster was “an old charlatan, I don’t know how a nice girl like you can work for that old man.”

“I told him,” she noted, “that Mr. Fenster was the kindest, most intelligent man I know, and Mr. Armstrong looked at me like I was crazy. I’m going to tell Mr. Fenster. That man shouldn’t be allowed to go around saying such things. Maybe we can sue him?”

In February she went out with the dancing man, by name Henry Davis, and had “a pleasant time, but isn’t it sad that he’s so shallow? Mr. Fenster says somewhere in this world there’s a soulmate for everyone. Maybe I should enroll in one of those computer dating clubs?”

Come March she accepted an invitation to Phantom of the Opera, coming to Orlando in April. The invitation came from one Charles Evers, who turned out to be the man writing the book about old Fairland. Seemed Charles Evers had sought out H. Dietrich for an interview, at which time Charles and Rosejoy renewed their seemingly platonic acquaintance.

I found myself yawning by the time I got to April. If the girl had been four months pregnant, she had to do something to get that way and soon, time was awastin’.

May was the month when the writing changed. All her previous entries had been open and almost childlike. In May she got real cosy and began to refer to a He in capital letters. I don’t think this particular He referred to the Almighty. He, whoever he was, ran into her at the local Publix. She was shopping in the produce department when He said He could grow watermelons twice the size of the supermarket offerings, and that claim led to a free watermelon offer, which in turn led to the delivery of “truly the biggest and tastiest watermelon I’ve ever seen. I offered to pay him, but He was insulted at the very thought, and if I wanted to repay him, I could treat him to a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

A cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts was the first in a series of casual meetings that culminated in dinner dates, and I thought, uh-huh, could be He’s my man. But who was He? What was his name? Why was she being so coy?

Her only hint as to why came in a rambling paragraph about past disappointments (“He said He was sorry, he swore it would never happen again.” Could that pertain to the tooth loss?) and introspective revelations: “Mother wondered why Charles Evers didn’t call, she liked him, and I said I don’t know, Mother, I guess he just doesn’t find me very interesting. I’m not ‘interesting,’ I know. I’m rather dull, actually; I’m too precise. Mother says I’m a perfectionist and perfectionists are hard to live with. I don’t think I’d be that hard to live with if I had a chance. I believe He finds me interesting. He hangs on my every word!”

I made a list of the men mentioned in Rosejoy Precious’s diary, leading off with He. Then came employer Fenster, Pastor Faversham, Jeffrey Wilson, Cornell Eps, Henry Davis, Charles Evers, dentist Edwards, and (unmentioned but possibly the watermelon connection?) Paul Reston. Just before I turned off the lights, I looked up elephants in my Bartlett’s and found George’s mother’s charming little rhyme about elephants and telephones. It came from a poem entitled “El-telephony” by Laura Elizabeth Richards, 1850–1943. If I could’ve, I would have said to Rosejoy Precious, “Now see, there’s an example — the kind of nineteenth century lady who’d think like that, that’s interesting.” Poor Ms. Precious, she would never know.

But... she thought He found her interesting. He must have found her interesting enough to take to bed, but in some men’s worlds that doesn’t mean much.

Her use of the word interesting intrigued me. She could have tried for sexy or beautiful or desirable, but all she wanted was to be interesting. Well, she’d been good to look at. And bright enough. Good manners, oh yes, well-behaved. You could take Ms. Precious anywhere. All of which must have been important to Him. And what did that tell me?

He was a conformist. Maybe a mother’s boy. And considering the effort involved, physically strong. Which set his age at a probable range of late twenties to forty, old enough to care about appearances, young enough to be able to transport a body two hundred fifty yards through a primeval forest in the dark. And there must have been a vicious side to him. She’d spoken of dental visits, but she’d never explained why, and I took it from the one reference to disappointments that he slapped her around. Maybe only once? “He swore it would never happen again.” What else had she written about ill treatment? I thumbed back to June, no, not then, July... “I think it’s the humidity that causes us to behave badly in the high heat of the year. Why, even my mother berated me this morning, and I must confess I reciprocated. I will not be ill-treated, not by anybody! I know a girl from high school who married her childhood sweetheart. We thought it so romantic. I saw her on television last week. She’s hiding out in a home for battered women. How can any woman with any self-pride get herself in such a situation? It’s pathetic! I refuse, absolutely refuse to be intimidated — by anyone!”

Yes. Pathetic. My last thought before I dropped off to sleep was that I needed to talk to Dr. Edwards. Maybe she’d said something to him about her attacker. Then, at the very last minute, just before blackout, I told myself I was missing someone. There was another man in Rosejoy Precious’s life — her father. Fenster had given me his last known address. I set my schedule for next morning.

Derek Precious lived in a mobile home in a trailer park. It was not a lots-of-money mobile home, it was a much-lived-in mobile home that had seen numerous casual occupants with lackadaisical habits. The place was a mess outside, ditto inside.

He’d been a goodlooking man. Traces remained — a good bone structure, strong jaw, widow’s peak hairline. But now his skin was sallow and unshaven, his dark eyes were sparkless, his hair uncombed. “I meant to go to the funeral,” he told me, “but I was too hungover and I figured she wouldn’t want me there anyway.”

“When did you last see your daughter?” I tried to imagine a fastidious Rosejoy Precious embracing this unclean parent and wondered how close their relationship had been.

“I never laid eyes on either of them, mother or daughter, after the divorce. They took me to the cleaners financially, that’s all they wanted from me. So I said to hell with them, to hell with all of them, and I stayed away. You wouldn’t go around either if you got kicked in the teeth every time you made a move.” Even his teeth looked dirty. Derek Precious had hit the very bottom of his personal pothole.

He was working as a janitor these days, having lost his job as a used car salesman, that being the first position he’d sought after closing his insurance agency in order to pay the divorce toll. He was as bitter as a sour orange. I couldn’t help feeling a small surge of sympathy until he got to the reason Fiona divorced him. “Sure, I slapped her around a couple of times, and I had a woman or two on the side, but that’s man business and lots of women put up with it so long as they got a Saks’ Fifth Avenue credit card, right? Am I right or am I right?”

I told him about the death of his grandchild, but that didn’t seem to affect him any more than the murder of his daughter. He made my skin crawl after awhile, and I got out of the trailer, passed a slatternly looking woman in his neighbor’s doorway and thought, she’s just his style. Poor Rosejoy Precious, he must have been one source of those disappointments mentioned in her diary. Everybody’s always talking about the value of mothers, but nobody realizes how important fathers are to a kid. I was no prize package, but I owed much of the best part of me to my dad.

Mentally I marked names off my hit list. Fenster? Too old. Pastor Faversham? Far out in left field. Jeffrey Wilson and Cornell Eps, alibis that held up. Henry Davis and Charles Evers, she didn’t like them well enough to go to bed with them. Paul Reston? Again the alibi bit. That left Dr. Edwards, a very doubtful starter. Rosejoy’s chums were fast striking out in the guilt department. Somebody had to have killed her, somebody had to impregnate her, He was the one for sure, but who the devil was He? I had one rule when totally frustrated: go to see the old know-it-all, Charlie Rule.

Charlie Rule was in the same age bracket as Fenster, but Charlie was probably the reason I was in law enforcement. He was a retired cop who had been a neighbor when we lived out in Spring Hammock. After he left the force, Charlie had decided to grow oranges. “I’m a dumb Dora when it comes to farming and stuff,” he confessed, and I could always find him in his grove mucking around with his orange trees.

Charlie loved to talk. He’d tell me all these tales about cop cases till I was bug-eyed, but he liked to listen, too. He’d been my grownup who listened; kids who have a grownup who listens are lucky kids in my mind. I’d go over to Charlie’s after school, and he’d be sitting out in his barn-office and I’d tell him anything that came to my mind. Like I said, he’d listen and comment, and then I’d tell him something else, and whatever was puzzling me, Charlie had a way of working out the solution, any solution, to a crime or to one of my juvenile problems.

He called his method of reasoning getting the itch. At least that’s the way I remember it. I’d go home and tell my dad, and usually he’d nod and say, that Charlie Rule, he’s one wise old bird, so maybe that’s why I’m a cop and that’s why, when I hit a speed bump, I still go to Charlie.

He doesn’t look a year older, Charlie doesn’t. He’s got some secret fountain of youth. I’ve never asked what because I figure it’s not something that can be shared. This day I told him about Rosejoy Precious, and he said he’d heard something about it on television but since he takes what he hears on television with a grain of salt he’d like to hear what I had to say. So I went through the whole story from discovery to Derek Precious, and as always, he listened.

“Have you talked to Pauline Reston?”

I shook my head.

“Well—” he was chewing a toothpick, which he moved from one side of his mouth to the other “—seems to me that’s your next move. Pauline Reston’s the smart one in that pair. I’ve always had the idea that, with twins, one gets more of this and the other gets more of that. I seem to recall that Pauline Reston got more than her share of brains.”

“Then, according to your theory, Paul Reston should have come up with some kind of a plus. Pauline got the brains and Paul got what?”

“Sweetness. Paul Reston was one sweet little boy. You know, the kind who gets pushed around a lot in school. They say his sister had to physically protect him more than once. Anyway, my point is maybe Pauline saw something that night, being as she’s the kind who’d notice things. Then again, maybe she didn’t. But it’s worth a talk. Let’s see, the men you mentioned. Fenster? No way. Dietrich hasn’t got the macho urge any more, maybe he never did have. The Reverend Faversham — you were really reaching there. Oh, I know, so-called men of God are sometimes self-ordained, but not Faversham. The boytoys, what were their names, Wilson and Eps; sounds to me like if either one had been involved he’d just slip the lady some cash and tell her to get rid of it. If she wouldn’t, hell, so what?”

He leaned back in his old auto seat chair and cogitated. “We’re assuming that the pregnancy and the murder are cause and effect — that young lady was too damned close-mouthed for her own good. I’ll do some more thinking, Ben, but so far I haven’t got the itch. You know what I mean, that inner starter that gets your engine running. Right now all I can say is call on Pauline Reston.”

Looking back, I had this vague memory that the Restons had been two or three grades behind me in school, and since I was busy bonding with my peers, was into sports and nagging for a car, I didn’t pay attention to younger kids, let them fight their own battles. Thus I expected Pauline Reston to look like her brother (sans mustache) and was surprised to find that except for height — she too was a tall one — they didn’t much resemble one another. His hair was dark, hers was on the blonde side. His eyes were a mixture of blue and brown like aggie marbles; her eyes were paler, more blue than brown. His face was soft; if I poked his cheek with a finger, it might deflate. Her chin was firm, her cheekbones prominent. She said, “Can I help you?”

I said, “I hope so.” And then, while she waited for me to go on, “I bought some azaleas the other day. From your brother. I don’t think they look too healthy, I’ve got them in my trunk. Can you give them a look-see?”

She poked the soil around the plants with one finger. “I don’t know about these containers.”

“I live in an apartment. On the second floor. I put them out on my porch; they get plenty of sun.”

She frowned. “That may be part of your problem right there — azaleas like some shade. Furthermore, this isn’t a real good time to plant them — didn’t Paul tell you?”

I got him off the hook. “Yes, but I was pretty determined. I guess I have a lot to learn about gardening. That’s because in real life I’m a cop. Ben Edison. I think we more or less grew up together.”

Her “Really?” was cool. “Do you want us to take these back? Is that what you want?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ll muddle on.” I shut the trunk. “What I really want is to talk to you. About the night Rosejoy Precious was killed. When her body was dumped in Big Tree Park.”

She looked me straight in the eye. “What could I possibly know about that?”

“Your brother told me he was out of town but you were here. Maybe you saw something, heard something? We’re having a kind of a tough time with this, anything at all might be a help.”

“Sorry,” she said and turned on her heel, headed back to the shop.

I tried a stab in the dark. “I was looking around just now, thought I saw a vegetable patch in the back there. And what looked like some watermelon vines. You folks grow watermelons?”

“It’s the wrong season for watermelons.”

She threw the words over her shoulder. I stayed close behind.

“I know, but they look like watermelon vines. I know a lady who says you grow the best watermelons she ever ate. Now, I’m really fond of watermelon. I suppose there’s no chance at all I could grow a vine on my porch — what do you think?”

“I think you’re wacko, that’s what I...”

Paul Reston loomed up in the near doorway.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Have we got a problem?”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said and I interrupted with, “Well, there might be a problem.”

The itch had hit me, the inexplicable signal that told me I was in the ballpark, all I needed to do was get a hit, even a single. It took two people to transport Rosejoy’s body, two strong people, and here I was, facing two strong people. I took a calculated swing.

“Who decided to get rid of her? Who did the deed while the other watched?”

Pauline Reston’s eyes blazed. “Wacko, that’s what. What are you talking about? Paul, I think — it sounds like he’s accusing us.”

Paul Reston made a sound as though he’d been punched in the stomach. He gagged, and for a minute I thought he was going to throw up. Pauline turned on her brother and slapped him across the face. He blinked and backed off.

“He’s subject to fits,” she told me, face suddenly smooth. “You’ve upset him, brought on a attack.” She reached for the telephone, “I’ll call 911 for the medics, Paul. Just sit down, you’ll be all right. Shut your mouth — and breathe naturally.”

That’s it. Shut your mouth.

“I... I... I...” gurgled Reston.

Pauline took charge.

“Bring your car up,” she ordered. “We won’t have time for the medics.”

I went closer to Reston. “They say they come out of it. They say just watch, if they get a tongue in the throat, pull it up and out...”

“Get your car!”

I went. When I came back, he was lying quietly, breathing normally. “He’s come out of it,” she told me. “Just like you said. I guess I had you bring your car up for nothing.”

“I see.” And then, “Actually, I’ve been waiting. Outside the door. I carry a small recorder around with me, it saves me from getting writer’s cramp. Want to hear what I heard?”

Paul Reston sat up slowly. He looked at his sister, but she paid him no attention, she was concentrating on me. I punched REPLAY.

“Control yourself, you fool. He’s only stringing bits and pieces together. He doesn’t know, I tell you. Pull yourself together! And take that wounded look off your face. You’re the one who got us into this mess. I told you to leave the girl alone. I told you you couldn’t marry, not ever. Winged Angels can’t marry, neither can Devil’s Disciples, period, end of sentence. We’ll spend our lives together, side by side, the bad and the good, all stirred together by our feckless father before we were born. And then — oh, the gall of it — you had to go and get the silly girl with child! When she told me, blinking at me with those cow eyes, I had a pair of bull clippers in my hand, heavy bull clippers I was using to prune the crepe myrtle, so I used them on Ms. Rosejoy Precious. To prune... Our children are seedlings, seedlings that we feed and nurture and grow... beautiful seedlings, perfect plants, bearing perfect fruit... Lie back now, he’ll be coming...”

“I never figured the killer for a woman” was George’s comment. “Things have sure changed; they are even sending them to the electric chair. Shakespeare said it: the female is getting deadlier than the male.”

“It was Kipling,” I corrected him. “And what he said was that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. The whole thing goes, When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride, he shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside; but the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail, for the female of the species is more deadly than the male.’ ”

“Whatever,” said George.

“And George, that little elephant jingle your mother taught you...”

I could feel him tensing. “It’s real clever,” I said. “I’d like to write it down.”