Baby Doll Games

by Margaret Maron

  Sigrid was puzzled. “Mion was going to stay with Kee?”

  “No. Evidently she told Ginger while they were getting dressed Saturday that she planned to camp out in one of the storage rooms upstairs until she could find a place of her own. A single place.”

  An interesting tidbit, thought Sigrid after Roman left her-“If I stay too long, it will look suspicious.” he had whispered with relish-but she couldn't see that it advanced their knowledge of why Emmy Mion had been killed. Except that it was one more piece in the puzzle.

  She looked around the large office and once again wished that Tillie were working this case with her. He would have seized on so many details about the room: the pictures of dancers and children, the books on choreography, the slapdash messiness of Emmy Mion's creative area as opposed to her managerial orderliness. He would have seen significance in the way her desk had been ransacked while her drawing table seemed to have been left untouched.

  Most of what he noticed on a case was irrelevant. Sigrid knew she usually discarded eighty-five percent of what he diligently brought to her attention, but at least she would have considered each point and would not now be sitting here with the uneasy feeling that she was overlooking something obvious. Well, sighing over Tillie's absence wouldn’t help, she scolded herself. She got up and walked around the office, consciously trying to look beneath the surface of each object that met her eyes.

  Roman had left the door ajar when he left and some twenty minutes passed before Sigrid heard sounds in the hall. A child appeared in the doorway. “Is Nate here?" it asked.

  "Down here, Calder,” she heard Nate Richmond call from further along the hall, as she caught sight of Christa Ferrell rounding the comer from the stage.

  “Ah, there you are, Sigrid. Don’t disappear on me, Calder. I shouldn’t be more than a minute.”

  Christa Ferrell closed the door. “I let the session ran longer than I expected,” she said, consulting the delicate gold watch on her wrist as she tugged down the sleeves of her green sweater. "We made a good beginning though. The children were quite forthcoming. There’s a lovely trust between them and the company.”

  “You let the dancers stay?”

  “Oh, yes. This is a group process, you understand. We’re not trying to resolve every conflict in their individual lives; we’re merely allowing them to validate and deal with this particular trauma. The dancers can speed up the process by helping to channel the responses, so to speak. Get their emotions about Emmy Mion out in the open more quickly so we can see where we stand.”

  “And where do you stand?”

  “Well, there’s the expected grief and bewilderment; also the guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Oh heavens, yes! A young child always feels guilty when something goes wrong in his world. He thinks that if he’d been a better child, obeyed all the rules, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a perfectly normal response. Counseling and therapy help him understand that bad things can occur independent of his personal behavior.” She glanced at her watch again. “Sigrid, I'm sorry, but I really do have to run or I’m going to be late for my session with Corrie Makaroff. And did your mother tell you? I'm so pleased she’s going to use Corrie and Tanya”

  “I’m glad you reminded me,” said Sigrid. “I’ll send you all the details if you want them, but one of my officers told me today that Ray Thorpe was apprehended last weekend and has already been arraigned. He’s pleaded guilty. The Makaroff children won t have to testify.”

  “That’s wonderful! What will he get? Life?”

  “More like six to ten years maximum,” Sigrid said dryly.

  “You’re kidding!” Christa's blue eyes were shocked. “A man violently murders a woman and that’s all the time he serves?”

  Sigrid shrugged. “I’m told six years can feel like a lifetime in some of our prisons.”

  Chapter 19

  They had copied the address from Amanda Gillespie’s case file. Situated on West Nineteenth Street a half-block off Eighth Avenue, it proved to be a four-story brick town house with a high stoop, polished brass fittings, and sturdy black iron filigree at the basement and first-floor windows. Jim Lowry pulled open the outer door to a minuscule entryway paved in white marble and Elaine Albee pushed the button marked 2a-K. Gillespie.

  Static hissed from the speaker beside the buttons and a crisp feminine voice said, “Yes?”

  “Detectives Lowry and Albee, Mrs. Gillespie,” said Elaine. “NYPD, May we speak to you about your daughter?”

  “Police? Oh dear God! What’s happened to her? Is she hurt?”

  Kicking herself for assuming that the dead girl was an only child, Elaine Albee quickly leaned toward the speaker again. “We’re here about Amanda, Mrs. Gillespie.” There was a long pause.

  “Mrs. Gillespie?”

  “Yes, all right.” The crispness had gone out of the woman’s voice.

  The buzzer sounded to unlock the inner door and the two police officers passed through into a stairwell made light and airy even on this gray day by a large skylight. The stairs were carpeted in deep blue pile and the white wallpaper was sprigged with small flowers of the same rich blue. All the woodwork seemed freshly painted in clean white enamel. A ten-speed bike was propped under the edge of the stairs near the door of the rear apartment and a child’s yellow rain hat had been left on the newel post for someone to claim.

  As Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry rounded the landing and walked up the second flight, a door opened at the top of the stairs. At first glance, the woman who waited for them looked like a teenager called from her homework assignments: straight brown hair that fell to her waist, jeans, a baggy red sweater with pushed-up sleeves, woolly red socks, no shoes, a yellow pencil tucked behind one ear, another pencil in her hand.

  Then they saw the deep lines beside her small tight mouth and more bitterness in those dark brown eyes than an ordinary American teenager could marshal.

  “Mrs. Gillespie?” smiled Elaine.

  “Yes.” There was no answering smile.

  Elaine introduced herself and Jim Lowry. “May we come in for a few minutes?”

  Mrs. Gillespie hesitated, then stepped back.

  Although the apartment felt small, inside it was as bright and cheerful as the stairwell. It overlooked the street and there were baskets of Swedish ivy hanging from window hooks; pots of red geraniums bloomed on the sills; baskets of bamboo and palms sat on the floor. A daybed covered in patchwork quilts and piled with small animal shaped pillows doubled as a couch, and two Boston rockers were pulled up near it around a low round table of scrubbed pine. In front of the windows was a large drawing table and an open, three-shelf metal cart that had been converted into a sort of rolling supply cabinet. It held dozens of bottles of colored inks, drawing pencils, and a coffee can that bristled with crow quill pens.

  But what immediately caught and held the eye were the many pen-and-colored-ink drawings which enlivened the plain white walls. Matted in bright red, green, or navy blue, all were framed in narrow white plastic and all were of children-children splashing in puddles on idealized city streets, (lying kites in Spristine park, tumbling with puppies, chasing butterflies; children limned in sunlight. Elaine paused before one of a dimpled toddler who had found a speckled ladybug on the daisy she held.

  "That looks exactly like a birthday card I sent my two-year-old niece last month,” she said.

  Mrs. Gillespie perched on the stool behind her drawing table. "It probably was.”

  The penny dropped. “I’ll be darned!” said Elaine. “I didn’t connect it before. Gillespie. Are you the Gilly of Clarion Cards’ Gillyflower line?”

  In spite of herself, Mrs. Gillespie looked gratified by the recognition. “Hardly anyone ever notices the name. Gillyflower is Clarion’s smallest line.”

  "My sister-in-law adores them. There’s a Clarion cardshop near my building and she always stocks up when she’s in the neighborhood.”

  Elaine did not like her sister-in-la
w and she now remembered with guilt how she’d deliberately selected the most sugary-sweet card she could find, knowing that her sister-in-law would consider it just too cute for words. (She’d later made it up to baby Belinda by taking the kid to the park and letting her drip chocolate ice cream all over her new pink sweater.) Something of a frustrated artist himself, Jim Lowry peered curiously at the surface of the drawing table. “Is that going to be a Christmas card?”

  “The first week, in November? Goodness, no. We work at least six months ahead. This is for a boy’s birthday around the Fourth of July.”

  She tilted the drawing toward them. Nearly finished, it showed a perfectly adorable little boy dressed in a red shirt, droopy blue jeans, and scuffed white sneakers and holding a sparkler. Off to the right sat a puppy with its equally adorable head cocked at an inquisitive angle as it watched the shower of burning sparks.

  “My sister-in-law would love it,” Elaine said truthfully. Jim Lowry knew her well enough to catch the nuances. He cleared his throat formally. “We’re sorry to have to bother you like this, Mrs. Gillespie.”

  “No, it’s okay. I understand you have to keep coming back, asking.” She added another blade of grass to the tuft growing beside the puppy.

  Elaine glanced at Jim. “Perhaps we weren’t clear, Mrs. Gillespie. Amanda's case is still open, of course, but we’re actually working on Emmy Mion’s death.”

  The woman’s long hair had fallen across her face as she drew. She pushed the strand behind her ear and looked up with a startled air. “Who?”

  “Emmy Mion,” said Elaine. “One of the dancers who worked at the 8th-AV-8 Dance Theater. You didn’t know she was murdered Saturday?”

  “No.” Mrs. Gillespie gave a vague, encompassing gesture of her hand. “No television. My last husband took the color console when he left and I haven’t bothered to get another.”

  She sat quite still and listened as the two police officers explained how Emmy Mion had died, then sighed softly and went back to her meticulous pen strokes across the picture. “I guess that’s the real reason she didn’t call back.”

  “She called you? When?”

  Mrs. Gillespie sat up on the stool and pushed her heavy hair back from her face with both hands, keeping her fingers clasped at the nape of her neck as she spoke. “I don't know when. Kelsy-that’s my fourteen-year-old- spent the weekend with her father down in D.C. because this morning was the deadline on a Father's Day card.” She grimaced. “Not exactly my favorite holiday so it wasn’t coming easily. Anyhow, I turned off the phone around eight Saturday morning and put on the answering machine so I wouldn’t be disturbed and then I forgot to check the messages till after dinner. I don’t remember which was first, but if it's any help, hers was either just before or just after one from a friend who called up on the spur of the moment around noon to ask if I wanted to meet her for lunch somewhere.”

  Elaine eyed her telephone. “I don’t suppose the message is still there?”

  "Sorry.” Mrs. Gillespie unclasped her hands, bundled her hair into a loose pile on the top of her head, and deftly secured it with three drawing pencils. “There wasn't much to it. Just that she thought she’d found something of Amanda’s and wanted to know when it'd be convenient to bring it around.”

  “Did she give you any idea of what that something might be?” asked Lowry.

  Mrs. Gillespie shook her head and the lines beside her mouth seemed to deepen. “I called the theater late last night and left a message that I really didn't care what they’d found. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it back.”

  Carefully and precisely, she inked in a small brown spot on the puppy’s head.

  “It was Amanda’s missing hair ribbon,” Elaine said gently.

  Mrs. Gillespie placed another brown spot on the puppy’s rump. "Look,” she said. “I know you people are only doing your job, but I’ve got this job to finish as well, and really there’s no point in just going over and over and-oh damn!”

  As she dipped her pen into the small bottle, her shaking hand upset it and brown ink ran across the drawing. “Damn, damn, damn” she moaned.

  While she dabbed at the stain ineffectually, the front door opened and a teenage girl entered. Her brown hair and eyes proclaimed her Mrs. Gillespie’s daughter; otherwise, she was a Madonna clone in short skirt, black lace-up granny boots, and excessive makeup. She stared at them curiously as she dumped a load of schoolbooks on a chair and stuck her furled umbrella in a large butter chum beside the door. Then, sensing something strained about their silence, she said, “Everything okay, Mom?”

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Gillespie answered raggedly. “I just messed up the picture. Another do-over. Kelsy, these are police officers. Detective Albee and Detective Lowry. They’re here about Mandy.”

  “Oh, Christ on a flagpole!” Kelsy Gillespie picked up her books and angrily flounced from the room, flinging back over her shoulder, “Let me know when they’ve gone, okay?”

  They heard a door bang down the hall.

  “I guess she’s still upset about her sister,” said Lowry. “Were they very close?”

  She gave a half-negative turn of her head. “Though teenagers don’t tell you much. Amanda worshipped her, but she seemed to get on Kelsy’s nerves a lot. There was that five years’ difference in their ages and then, too, Kelsy didn’t like Amanda’s father. I thought she was just jealous of him, but kids know, don’t they? He turned out not to be very likable in the end.”

  Karen Gillespie’s voice held a detachment which implied that the things of which she spoke no longer had the power to hurt.

  She put aside the blotting paper she’d used to dry up the spilled ink and covered the ruined drawing with a sheet of tracing paper. “He paid child support every month on the button, I’ll give him that; but I told him if he ever tried to see Amanda, if he ever so much as spoke to Kelsy again, I’d swear out a warrant for his arrest.” Elaine Albee suddenly felt tired. No matter how many statistics she read, no matter how often she heard about it, she knew she’d never get used to finding it in nice middle-class homes. “He molested your daughters?” Mrs. Gillespie did not look up. “One of the side benefits to working at home: You learn about things before they get out of hand.” Her pencil moved rapidly across the sheet in seemingly random strokes. “He liked to give the girls their baths. Mandy was two, Kelsy seven. I heard Kelsy cry out and I ran into the bathroom and there he was in the tub with them. He-” The pencil lead snapped and Mrs. Gillespie took a deep breath. “I took the girls to a friend’s house that night and I gave him twenty-four hours to pack up anything he wanted and get out of our lives. And before you ask it, I’ll tell you that he went back to New Mexico six years ago, and he conducted his regular Shakespeare seminar for eighteen graduate students the day Amanda was killed. Those other detectives checked.”

  “Amanda’s name wasn’t really Gillespie then?” asked Elaine.

  “No. I’d been using the Gilly signature on my pictures and Clarion Cards had started buying my designs before I married him, so I kept the name She stuck the pencil into a battery-operated sharpener on the tabletop and held it there until it was ground down to a stub. “After what happened that night, I told everybody that Amanda was a Gillespie from then on, too. My first husband-Kelsy’s father-he didn't mind and it was no one else’s business.”

  “I know you’ve been asked this before,” said Jim, “but please consider it carefully one more time: Isn't it just barely possible that one of those dancers could have tried to molest Amanda?”

  Mrs. Gillespie threw the stub into a nearby wastebasket and took up a fresh pencil. “Anything's possible, isn’t it?” There was another tension-filled pause, then she said abruptly, “Look, I’m not a very huggy, touching person. I wasn’t brought up like that. My parents loved us, but they weren’t physically demonstrative. That’s just the way they were. We certainly didn’t feel slighted or neglected, my brothers and I. Kelsy’s a lot like me, but Amanda- It was different with her
. She was always nuzzling up to me, leaning against me, kissing me goodbye every time she left the apartment.

  ‘Those dancers- I went to a couple of Amanda s classes. They seemed very”-she twirled the pencil slowly between her fingers as she searched for the right word- “spontaneous. They hugged the kids, patted them, let them sit on their laps or snuggle up when one of the others was giving instruction. Amanda liked that. But we had talked about the difference between healthy touching that makes you feel loved and touching that troubles you.” Her eyes met Lowry’s. “If it happened, she would have told me.”

  “Unless she didn’t get the chance,” he said.

  “Unless she didn’t get the chance,” she agreed bleakly. “Mrs. Gillespie,” said Elaine, “may I talk to Kelsy a minute?”

  “I don’t mind. Kelsy might. Her doors the first on the right.”

  Until then Elaine had been standing with her raincoat over her arm. She handed it to Jim and went down the hall to tap at the closed door.

  When there was no answer, she opened it.

  Kelsy sat on her bed, granny shoes tumbled on the floor, her stockinged feet drawn up beneath her. “What do you want?” she asked sullenly.

  “Just to talk a minute. Okay if I come in?”

  The girl shrugged. "Suit yourself.”

  Elaine stepped over the books, moved aside a pile of clean laundry, and sat down on the end of the other twin bed. She looked around the room. No cutesy kids here. The walls were thick with posters of rock groups. “Van Halen,” she said, tilting her blonde head to one of the posters over the bed. “What did you think of their last album?”

  “Look, could you just cut the crap and get to the point?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Kelsy pushed her back against the headboard and stretched out her legs in an impatient gesture. Her eyes smoldered with resentment. “We both know you don’t give a damn about what I think of Van Halen. You just want to soften me up so I’ll tell you what I know about Mandy.”