My deteriorating mental state aside, I had to come up with an answer to the boss’s “item” question. “I was in the bedroom looking for a watch and a medal his sister gave him.” Not bad for on-the-spot fiction. All those years of reading and teaching composition were paying off. I didn’t have a clear idea of why I hadn’t owned up to taking the room box, except that I felt it might be too complicated to describe.
“What kind of medal? Like a war medal?” the subordinate asked.
“Nah, she means like a saint’s medal,” the boss said. “Right?” he asked, as though that had better be the correct answer. Were my captors practicing Catholics? Could I use the famous Catholic guilt to win my freedom? I tried to remember which shoulder came first in making the sign of the cross.
Too late I recalled Skip’s advice about lying (make it as simple as possible) and my own when I taught creative writing (use what you know). I wracked my brain for the name of a Catholic saint. “A Saint Jude medal,” I said, flashing on the name of the hospital to which I often donated money at the request of friends when their loved ones died. I wondered if that would count as points now.
“Ha, that’s a good one. Patron of lost causes,” said the shorter man, the nonboss, who laughed until the boss gave him a serious frown and a nudge that also looked serious.
I winced as if my own ribs had been slammed. I hoped I hadn’t started a chain of violence. Weren’t Catholic saints supposed to bring peace and love?
“Did you find them?”
“Who?” I asked.
“The i-tems. The watch and the medal,” the boss said.
Ah, of course. “No, I just got here.” I brought out the most sincere smile I could. “Is that what you came for, too? Did Susan send you?” I managed a hollow-sounding chuckle. “That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? Wanting to double-check.”
Make nice.
The nonboss started to say something, but the boss shot him that look again.
“Mr. Halbert is an associate and we are here looking for property of ours that was in his custody,” the boss said.
Apparently real-life goons talked the way movie goons did. They even looked like movie goons, the boss with hardly any hair and a scar across his cheek, the underling with a rose tattoo on the back of his hand. The question was—were they the movie hit men who did the killing, or were they the good guys, ones dispatched to protect the innocent? I thought it best not to ask.
I took another shot at sitting up. The men reacted by putting their right hands on their hips. Were there two guns? Or did they both get an attack of arthritis pain at the same time? In other circumstances I would have been greatly amused. I stayed half up, half down, stuffed into the corner of the orange sofa, much the way Oliver had been sitting on the Fergusons’ stoop.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked, to fill the silence.
Another blunder. Had I learned nothing from my nephew? “Guilty people always chatter when there’s silence,” he’d told me. “My job is to wait them out.”
Lucky for me, my captors chose to ignore my question. “Can we help you to your car?” the boss asked.
I nearly jumped from my half-sitting position. “I can go?”
Strike three for what not to do when armed men had the upper hand. A rule to live by: don’t give them choices that could work out disastrously for you.
Although I knew I’d flunked the “interview” at every turn, the nonboss handed me my tote. Close up, I could see that the rose in the tattoo design had more thorns than petals.
“You don’t mind that we looked in your bag? We had to be sure you didn’t take any of our property by mistake,” the boss said.
“No, no,” I stammered. “That’s all right. I just took a broken miniature scene.”
“We know.”
And you also know who I am if you looked through my bag, I thought. I considered that not good news.
“I’m going to fix the box,” I stammered, as if it were his box I’d dropped.
Was there a game that had four strikes, the fourth pertaining to offering unnecessary information to captors who were about to emancipate you?
“We know.” Now the boss seemed more anxious for me to leave than I was.
I stood and made a giant effort not to sway. I held my tote in front of me, chest high, wishing it were bulletproof, though it had been a while since I’d actually seen the handle of the gun, if that’s what it was. I walked toward the door, slowly, at one point grabbing on to a floor lamp.
The nonboss rushed over to me and put his ugly hand under my elbow to steady me.
“I’m fine, thank you,” I said, relieved when his beefy arm dropped to his side.
The men watched in silence as I tottered the rest of the way to the door. I wondered if they were going to shoot me in the back, too cowardly to kill me while looking me in the eyes. Oliver Halbert had been shot by someone facing him, I realized. How frightened he must have been. I shivered at the image.
Only a few more steps and I’d be out the door. Would I hear a gunshot aimed at my back? Or would I be dead before the sound traveled to my ear? What would they do with my body? Prop it up on Oliver’s couch?
It was a bad time to remember something Skip told us about after a seminar he’d taken at the police academy. Legislation was being proposed to use a process called alkaline hydrolysis (or something chemical like that) to dispose of human bodies. Animal carcasses had been going this way for many years—burned in lye at a very high temperature and a great deal of pressure in a stainless-steel cylinder. Essentially, they were pressure-cooked, the remains being a syrupy residue that could be flushed down the drain.
I swallowed hard. My family would never find me. I continued walking, clutching my tote, listening for the gunshot.
The loudest noise I heard was the sound of the door closing behind me.
I stumbled into the driver’s seat and immediately locked my car doors. I longed to lean back on the seat awhile to catch my breath and steady my nerves, but I also wanted to get out of gunshot range as soon as possible.
I dug in my tote for my keys and found them out of their usual inside pocket. The contents of my tote were all out of order. The coins that had been in my wallet were now loose at the bottom of the bag and the miniature construction site was a bit more banged up. I felt lucky that they were the only things that had been manhandled.
I had the crazy thought that I should have spent my own time in the apartment looking for papers, also, instead of examining a miniature scene that wasn’t that different from a hundred others I saw at shows and in my crafts group. Perhaps I would have found more evidence of Oliver’s interest in my husband—proof of Ken’s absolute innocence of any wrongdoing would have been nice.
All in all, I was glad to be alive and happy that I hadn’t been toting anything of interest to the goons.
Chapter 10
In the safety of my home, I curled up on my own handsome, cream-colored sofa with a steaming cup of chamomile tea. I needed all the soothing I could get.
I toyed with the idea of calling Skip, but what a convoluted conversation that would be as I skirted around certain aspects of my outing. At some point I’d have to tell him what might simply have been fantasy from the barista at Seward’s Folly. I had nothing to report to Susan, except that I’d found, broken, and nearly lost the little construction scene she’d made for her brother. I’d wait until I’d had a chance to repair the box before I called her.
I missed Maddie. What had I been doing out where I didn’t belong, putting myself in danger for no good reason, when I should have been enjoying ice cream sundaes and making orange-and-black garlands with my granddaughter? If her parents knew how negligent I’d been, they’d probably take away my visitation rights.
I dug out my cell phone, the closest phone to me, and pushed speed dial for Maddie. I knew her ring comprised a few notes of a Madonna (the singer, not the Catholic saint) song that was popular when her parents w
ere in junior high. I hummed the few notes in my mind as I waited for Maddie to pick up. Click on? Push talk? I feared I’d never catch up with the changes in common phrases brought about by technology.
“Wow, Grandma, you called me! Wow!” Maddie sounded so excited, I felt even worse about my neglect of her.
“How’s your day in the big city?”
“It’s okay. We’re at Pier Thirty-nine now. It says on the Internet that the temperature here is sixty-three degrees, six degrees below the average high temperature for October in San Francisco.”
Poor Maddie. How bored did an eleven-year-old have to be before she memorized weather statistics? Bored was better than “in danger” however. The thought that Maddie might have been with me in Oliver’s apartment was too much to contemplate. Guns or no guns, the two men had been scary. I had a strong feeling that if I hadn’t fallen and knocked myself out, they might have done it for me.
“How come you’re using your computer to look up the weather with all there is to do at Pier Thirty-nine? Isn’t there a lookout where you can see lots of sea lions?”
“Yeah, we did that.”
“Aren’t there jugglers and puppet shows? And the merry-go-round?”
“Please, Grandma. How old do you think I am?”
Apparently, ten years older than she was last year when she seemed to enjoy the entertainment. I pictured Maddie clicking away at her computer while tourists all around her took photos of the marine life and the beautiful hills of Marin County across the bay.
On the other hand, there was Maddie, with access to the Internet. An idea came to me. I tried to brush it away but gave in to it.
“Are you online now, sweetheart?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of spotty, but we found this little restaurant with Wi-Fi. Aunt Beverly’s in the restroom. But don’t worry. There’s a whole class of kids here with their teacher and she’s keeping an eye on me. I mean, I don’t need her eye, but Aunt Beverly made the deal.”
“Can you look up a man named Patrick Lynch for me?”
“I already did.”
She must not have understood me. “I’m talking about a man who’s a businessman, a developer, in Lincoln Point.” Not a rock star or a sports figure who may have the same name was what I meant.
“I know. I already found him. He has his own webpage so it makes it easier. I gave up researching Mrs. Giles’s brother, because Uncle Skip already knows so much about him, so I switched to that other man you were talking about, Patrick Lynch.”
“How did you remember his name?”
She sighed, sounding very tired of having to ask this question. “How old do you think I am?”
Never mind how old she was, my granddaughter was way ahead of every child in her age group. I was sure I was the only grandmother who felt that way. I wondered if there was a bumper sticker with that saying.
Now for the real question. “Was there a photograph of Mr. Lynch? Can you tell me what he looks like?”
“Yeah, there were lots of images. He’s kind of gross-looking. He’s bald and he has this scar on his cheek.”
I swallowed, my suspicion confirmed. Should I feel better or worse that my temporary captor was a respected (by some) businessman? Worse, I decided, since he was also a murder suspect in at least two minds, Susan’s and mine. I felt a call to Skip coming on.
“Does that help with The Case, Grandma? Huh?”
“It’s a big help, sweetheart. Thank you. You did so well that now you can go back to enjoying the sea lions because there’s nothing more to do on the case.”
“If I was sitting there next to you, you’d tickle me, right? Because there’s still a lot to do, right?”
I thought of asking her to look up Max Crowley also, but I was fairly sure he was the second man in Oliver’s apartment. If I needed to, I could try to find him on my own, admittedly lame computer.
I glanced at Susan’s sorry room box, now on my kitchen counter, waiting to be moved to the crafts room for repair. It was going to be hard to work on it without thinking of the frightening men who’d handled it and of the chance that one or both of them might be Oliver’s murderer. I looked past the room box toward the door leading to the garage and pictured the piles of unopened cartons. I thought of Oliver’s list of “potentials for investigation,” of his own sullied reputation, and Ken’s name on the list. And the most commanding image of all, flashing before my eyes—the photographs of Ken holding someone’s baby.
“Right, Grandma?” Maddie repeated. “The investigation isn’t over.”
“I mean it, sweetheart. There’s nothing more to do,” I said.
Even if Maddie and Beverly left San Francisco immediately, they wouldn’t be home for at least an hour. They’d be traveling south on the 101 freeway, which was busy all day long. At one in the afternoon, there was no telling how clogged up the lanes would be in both directions.
Beverly had taken the phone before I hung up with Maddie. “I give up,” she said. “I think this was a bad idea. Maddie misses you.”
“You mean she misses the action,” I said.
“Uh-huh. We’ll be home shortly.”
I could get a lot done in an hour. The garage beckoned me. What other photographs or memorabilia lurked out there in the boxes that had sat on my shelves for more than five years? I could tear them all open right now and put the whole issue of Ken’s other life to rest.
I could also call my nephew for an update. With one sentence he could end my agony—“We checked it all out,” he could say, “and Uncle Ken’s name was on that list only because he attended a meeting once.”
“Whew,” I’d say, and move on.
I decided to leave that fantasy alive and called Susan.
“There’s nothing much to report,” I told her. “Except that the wonderful room box you made for Oliver was in a very special place on his bookshelf. I’m sure you saw it there.”
“I didn’t visit him as often as I should have, Gerry,” Susan said, her voice choking. “I loved my brother, and I didn’t do enough for him.”
“Nobody ever does, Susan.”
I gave Susan a chance to pull herself together, then braced myself for two other things she needed to hear. I told her first how I’d dropped the precious box.
“But I know I can repair it very easily,” I said quickly.
“Don’t worry about that, Gerry. I can do it myself. I’m glad you took it away. I’d been worried that maybe the police took it or a cleaning person or something. I sure would like to have it. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to go back to that apartment. Unless you come with me?”
“What about his daughters?” I asked, not willing to commit to a return visit to the orange couch. I could still taste the sticky fuzz from the carpet though I brushed my teeth and gargled three or four times when I got home.
“Jeanine and Casey were traveling around Europe with their mother and an aunt when all this happened. They’re on their way back today. I hate to put the girls through the ordeal of going to their father’s apartment.”
“You don’t need to decide anything right away, Susan. I know how many awful details you have to attend to, but can you take it easy for the rest of the day?”
“I suppose.” The last syllable came out like a long sigh. “So there’s nothing else?” she asked me. I wished I could have told her that Skip was putting handcuffs on Oliver’s killer at this very moment. Images of possible suspects flashed through my mind. I startled at one of old Lillian Ferguson in a pink flowery housedress being carted off to jail. In the fantasy, she was followed quickly by a man with an enormous tattoo displayed on his naked upper torso.
I really needed to get back to the boring life of a retired schoolteacher.
“There is one question I have,” I said to Susan, with a casual air. “Did you give the key to Oliver’s place to anyone else?”
“No, of course not. Was someone there?”
“No, no. I just wondered. I wouldn’t have wanted to w
alk in on anyone. You go and rest and I’ll talk to you later.”
I clicked off and let out a loud groan. I wasn’t happy about the ease with which I was able to invent stories—lies—lately. I was angry with myself about lying to both Maddie and Susan. For their own good, I reasoned, but my stomach turned over and the chamomile tea seemed to have gone sour.
I pushed speed dial for Skip’s cell phone. With his girlfriend in Chicago, he should be free to spend an hour with his aunt on a Sunday afternoon, preferably before his mother and Maddie returned from San Francisco. I’d have to take my chances on a scolding, but I hoped he’d be able to help me separate truth from fiction about the people involved in his investigation.
“Hey, Aunt Gerry,” he said right away. Caller ID was one technological marvel I’d immediately embraced.
“Any news?” I asked.
“Do you have some kind of radar for these things?”
“What things?”
“We traced the gun in Halbert’s hand to one that was used in a crime about five years ago.”
“That’s progress, isn’t it?”
“In a manner of speaking, but you won’t like what state the crime took place in.”
It hardly took half a minute. “Tennessee,” I said.
“There’s that radar again.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of guns in Tennessee, Skip, and that some of them end up in California.” In Lincoln Point, in the hands of a Tennessee native? I hardly believed it myself. “It looks like whoever killed Oliver went to a lot of trouble to make it look like a suicide.”
“Off the record, Aunt Gerry, who would kill himself on someone else’s porch?”
“I’m glad you’re coming around,” I said.
“So, let’s see if I can guess what you did all day,” Skip said. “You got your newspaper, read it from cover to cover while you drank coffee and ate some toast, did the crossword puzzle . . .”
Monster in Miniature Page 12
