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

“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?”