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

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?”