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.”