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.