Baby Doll Games

by Margaret Maron

  But later, just as she was almost asleep, she came wide awake with a sudden certainty as to why Emmy Mion had died on Saturday instead of Friday or Sunday.

  And Freud was wrong. There were such things as accidents.

  Chapter 27

  Wednesday morning dawned clear and sunny, cool enough for coats but warmer than the day before. Mick Cluett still had a chesty cough but at least he was at the morning briefing in Sigrid’s office.

  As coffee and doughnuts made the rounds, Sigrid said, “Glad to see you’re feeling better, Cluett,” then moved briskly through the review of her team’s caseload as each member brought the others up to date on current lines of investigations.

  She was pleased to hear that the leads she’d given Peters and Eberstadt yesterday had borne fruit and that a suspect had confessed to killing the floater.

  “The D.A.’s office called,” said Elaine Albee, brushing powdered sugar from her blue tweed jacket. “That podiatrist’s trial went to the jury late yesterday and it took them only twelve minutes to return a guilty verdict.”

  Sigrid had deliberately saved the Emmy Mion investigation for last; and after other business was out of the way, she used the timetable she’d constructed yesterday to review what they’d learned so far. As for what she now suspected, she waited until after she’d dismissed everyone except Elaine Albee and Mick Cluett.

  Cluett cleared her file cabinet and desk of empty paper cups and dumped them in her wastebasket along with the doughnut napkins as Sigrid outlined her speculations, but he gave her all his attention when she described how the killer might have lulled Emmy Mion’s suspicions.

  “How good are you with children?” Sigrid asked Elaine.

  The younger woman shrugged. “Average, I guess.”

  “The little Pennewelf boy-I think he’s named Billy- goes to school a half-day in the afternoons,” Sigrid said. “See if you can get him to tell you who Emmy yelled at about Amanda Cillespie and then meet us at the theater.” She looked at the time. "Say in two hours?”

  As Elaine left, Sigrid gave Cluett Sergio Avril’s address and told him to sign out a car. “This early, he’ll probably be at home.”

  In short terse sentences, she told him precisely what he was to ask the composer and what she expected to hear when he joined her at the theater. “But no leading questions,” she warned. “If it’s what I think, I want it to come in Avril’s own words.”

  Mick Cluett hoisted his beefy frame from the chair beside her desk and then hesitated.

  Sigrid looked up from her paperwork. “Question, Cluett?”

  The older man started to answer but was seized by a paroxysm of coughing.

  He was carrying at least fifty extra pounds, thought Sigrid, and if his flushed face were any indication, his blood pressure was probably too high. His dark suit fit well enough, but the buttons of his shirt strained at his belly, and his collar was too tight. How many years since he’d seen the inside of a gym, she wondered, or chased anyone down a dark alley? And why had McKinnon specialled in a detective of Cluett’s age, in his condition, instead of leaving him to finish out his forty in Manhattan Beach? “Cluett?” she repeated as his cough subsided.

  “I’m okay. I probably should have taken off another day but I don’t have much sick leave left and-” Again he hesitated.

  Sigrid frowned. “You wanted something?”

  “It's just that I’ve been thinking, Lieutenant. Your name and all.”

  "Yes?” she said icily.

  Mick Cluett shifted uneasily under her cool gaze, but plunged on. “You wouldn’t be any kin to Detective Leif Harald, would you now?”

  “My father.”

  Mick Cluett cocked his head. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said, studying her openly. “Leif Harald's kid. I thought there was something familiar about your name.” A broad smile creased his puffy face as he sat back down in the chair, clearly prepared for a long and comfortable session of reminiscing.

  Sigrid knew it was to be expected. She remembered her father only in vague and unconnected snatches but always with laughter; and since childhood, she had watched Anne turn strangers into instant friends with her ready smiles and easy southern charm. People who had known only her parents always assumed that Leif and Anne’s daughter had to have inherited their gregariousness.

  “You got Leif’s tallness and his eyes,” said Cluett, unconsciously paralleling her thoughts, “but not much of Anne, did you?” He looked suddenly abashed. “What I mean is, well, she was a little thing, wasn’t she?”

  Sigrid knew very well that he was remembering her mother’s beauty rather than her height, but she nodded. “Hair like yours, though. She still living?”

  “We had dinner together last night,” Sigrid acknowledged. “Detective Cluett-•”

  “Aw, call me Mickey,” he said expansively. “Everybody else does and hell! I bounced you on my knee a couple of times when you weren’t big as a minute.”

  Sigrid mentally gritted her teeth at his familiarity. It was always difficult to make herself speak of anything personal. Especially here. She had kept her off-duty life rigorously separate from her work. Not for her the easy camaraderie the others seemed to fall into, the surface chitchat of daily intercourse. It was easier to hide her self-consciousness behind a facade of reserve. In the past year she d learned to trust Tillie enough to begin to lower her guard with him, but she knew that most of the others considered her a cold and sexless automaton. They might not dispute her competence, but she knew that she made them uncomfortable.

  Mick Cluett seemed to feel he had her pegged, though, for he was now rattling on freely about the old days. “Why, I broke your dad in when he first signed on the force. They used to put all the rookies with me for their first six months. I was working over in the old Sixteenth Precinct when Leif came aboard and I remember-”

  “Detective Cluett,” she interrupted crisply with a pointed glance at her watch. “I suggest we continue this another time. You’ve now somewhat less than two hours to interview Avril before we meet with Albee at the theatre”

  “Oh, yeah. Right, Lieutenant,” he said, getting to his feet heavily. But there was a hurt expression on his broad face as he left.

  Yet when she was alone again, Sigrid did not immediately return to work, for, by his loquaciousness, the old detective had stirred a half-memory of her own. She crossed to the file cabinet and pulled out a folder. When Captain McKinnon had suggested she read the records of her father’s death, she had photocopied a set of those yellowing reports for her personal files.

  Now she leafed through them until she came to a report filed by the driver of one of the patrol units which had replied to McKinnon's call for help.

  It was signed by Michael Cluett.

  Since the hardware store didn’t open till ten, Elaine Albee had planned to seek Billy Pennewelf at home three blocks away; and the store was still dark when Sigrid passed. Inside the 8th-AV-8 Dance Theater, however, she found Eric Kee and Win West in the comer prop room where, under Helen Delgado’s supervision, they had begun to construct simple props and backdrops for their Christmas production. Eric was cutting out basic toy shapes from heavy cardboard: a drum, a ball, a teddy bear which would be painted and then stapled to scrap blocks of two-by-fours so that they could stand around the tree.

  Win was at work on the tree itself, dreamily pasting strips of newspaper onto a chicken-wire skeleton.

  “When it’s sprayed green, and draped in some tinsel, it’ll look enough like a tree,” Helen said confidently.

  Sigrid looked around the workroom, noting the slapdash lack of order in the way the designer kept her supplies and equipment.

  She wandered back down the hall to the dimly lit stage. The dusty velour maskers on each side were in place again and the life-size goblin puppets were piled beside the light and sound boards, but the back screen was still rolled up above the mirrored rear wall. Sigrid stood quietly at the center of the stage and tried to place each member of the tr
oupe.

  There was where Sergio Avril claimed to have stood, there Ginger Judson claimed to have sat. Cliff Delgado there, separated from Eric Kee by one of the maskers. There from Win West’s spot, Rikki Innes claimed to have seen Ginger diagonally opposite before Rikki crossed between the screen and mirror to her own place, again separated from Ginger’s by a velour masker.

  Closely witnessed only by Ginger, the killer had entered from Eric’s place to Sigrid’s left, had danced with Emmy for but a short moment or two, lured her to the top of the scaffold over here, then smashed her down onto the fence to spill her life’s blood upon the stage floor there, where one spot was scrubbed cleaner than the rest.

  “Lieutenant?”

  Sigrid turned to see Elaine Albee watching from beyond the proscenium.

  "You were right on the money, Lieutenant.”

  Sigrid swung herself over the edge and motioned Elaine to one of the pews where they could speak without the risk of being overheard.

  With commendable brevity, the younger detective reported on her approach to Billy Pennewelf s mother and the mother’s no-nonsense request that the child answer her questions. “One thing,” Elaine concluded. “Billy said Emmy was angriest-and I'm quoting him directly-over his holes. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Sigrid nodded. “I think it does.” She looked at her watch. Cluett should have been here by now. Well, they’d have to continue without him.

  They went backstage through the side door, down past the wooden steps, past the office and the bathroom, switching on lights as they went, to Nate Richmond’s workroom. Elaine turned on the lights there and Sigrid immediately went past her into the makeshift cave which served as the light wizard s darkroom.

  It was as Sigrid remembered from her cursory examination on Saturday: the pipes and faucets that serviced the darkroom were jury-rigged taps on the bathroom plumbing next door. Most of the cracks on the bathroom side had been legitimately patched with wide electrical duct tape to prevent light from leaking into the darkroom; but as she’d expected even before hearing Billy Pennewelf s testimony, concealed beneath a calendar and the instruction sheet from a box of toner were two small holes, covered by easily movable flaps, on either side of the leaky toilet next door about half-way up the wall.

  He would only have had to wait until a child turned its back to the wall and dropped its underpants to take as many surreptitious pictures as he liked, the camera sounds masked by the constantly running water in the tank.

  “Amanda Gillespie told her sister that he used to let her help him in the darkroom,” Elaine said. “Maybe the flap wasn’t closed tightly that day and light leaked in. Or maybe she walked in on him as he was taking pictures.”

  Even as she spoke, the outer door opened and Nate Richmond entered, followed by Ulrike Innes.

  “Ah.” He smiled at them. “I thought for a moment I must have left the lights on. Were you looking for…?”

  His words died away as he stepped into the darkroom and saw the open flaps over his sink.

  “Yes, Mr. Richmond,” said Sigrid. “We were hoping to see the pictures Emmy Mion found Saturday when she came looking for pictures of Amanda Gillespie’s class. I can’t believe you would have destroyed them after the trouble you went to to make them. And to steal them back.”

  “I-I don’t know what you mean,” he faltered, his face ashen.

  Ulrike Innes placed her strong body in front of him protectively. “Aren’t you supposed to have a search warrant before you invade someone’s privacy?”

  Elaine snorted. “Mr. Richmond didn’t seem to mind invading the kids’ privacy,” she said hotly.

  Sigrid held up a restraining hand.

  “We can, of course, get a warrant if you insist-”

  “Don’t bother,” Richmond said wearily. “I’ll show you.”

  “Nate!” cried Rikki, swinging around to face him. “What are you doing?” The pale oval of her face was terrified for him.

  “It doesn’t matter, Rikki,” he soothed her. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Not really. You’ll see.”

  Above the sink was a set of metal shelves which held yellow boxes filled with photographic paper, developing chemicals and the like. Nate stood on a step stool and brought down one of the eight-by-twelve boxes.

  Inside were dozens of black-and-white photographs of partially nude children, some printed through gauzy filters, the others in sharp detail.

  “And this is how you get your jollies?” asked Elaine, repulsed.

  “No!” he said. “See, Rikki? That’s why I couldn’t talk about it, not even to you. Everyone looks at pictures like this and yells Voyeur! But I’m not!” He was almost in tears as he pleaded his case to Sigrid. “I’m not, Lieutenant. I love children, but for themselves alone. Their sweetness, their innocence-everything about them. I’d never do anything to mess that up. I don’t lust for them. Not like dirty-minded people think. It's only that their bodies are so beautiful, so delicate. Look at the curve of that small bottom, the way her skin almost glows with an inner luminosity. They grow up and out of that beauty so quickly.”

  He fanned out some of the pictures. “I look at these pictures and I feel like Wordsworth. Remember? ‘Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God.’ Heaven really does lie all around young children- so much immortal beauty and so fleeting.”

  Rikki was sobbing openly now and he put his arm around her. “Don’t cry, Rikki.”

  “Only pictures?” she sobbed. “I didn’t know. I thought you had-Oh Nate, I’ve been so frightened for you. When I heard Emmy storming about a photograph-”

  “Somehow I left one of these mixed in with the prints of last winter’s dance class,” said Nate. “She came in with a plaid ribbon Saturday, said she thought it belonged to Mandy Gillespie. Poor little Mandy.”

  Sigrid stopped him. “Mr. Richmond, I think it’s time to warn you and Miss Innes, before you say anything else, that you do have a right to a lawyer. Albee?”

  Stunned, the two listened numbly as Elaine Albee read them their rights under the Miranda ruling.

  “Do you understand, Mr. Richmond?” Sigrid repeated when Elaine had finished.

  “Yes,” said Richmond, “but it’s okay, I tell you. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Miss Innes?”

  “Y-yes,” the pale-haired dancer quavered, “but Nate couldn’t have killed Emmy. He was working the lights.”

  “Killed Emmy?” His gnome-like face was shocked. “Of course I couldn’t. Look-could we sit down?”

  He led them from the darkroom to the low round table in the middle of his workshop and pulled, out chairs for everyone. Rikki Innes clung to his side and he patted her consolingly. “Emmy was my friend. We go back forever and in the end I think I did make her understand, though I had to promise I wouldn’t take any more of these pictures. You heard her, Rikki.”

  "‘Is that what she meant?” Rikki asked, fresh tears sliding down her cheek. “You didn't tell me and then later when she said-”

  “When she said what, Miss Innes?” asked Sigrid. “When she said she’d found Amanda Gillespie’s missing hair ribbon in the pocket of Mr. Richmond’s jacket?”

  “What?” said Nate.

  “She had moved the rest of her winter clothes to the dressing room upstairs,” Sigrid told him. “Either she’d taken your jacket home with her last spring or it’d been hanging up there mixed in with other things. Whichever, something unexpected happened Saturday. The weather changed early Saturday morning and instead of Indian summer, it was suddenly chilly. So Emmy Mion ran upstairs and by sheer accident took the first jacket she came to. Your red-plaid jacket, Mr. Richmond. And when she eventually put her hands in the pocket sometime that morning, she came out with the hair ribbon Amanda’s killer had picked up automatically last February.”

  In a wordless silence broken only by Rikki’s hopeless weeping, Nate shook his head as if dazed by the lieutenant’s scenario.

 
Implacably, Sigrid hammered home her accusations. “That’s when you knew you’d have to kill Emmy, too.”

  “But I didn't! I couldn't have! A hundred people know I was upstairs, working the lights from the rear booth.”

  “You see?” cried Rikki. “You know he couldn’t have.”

  “Yes, but you could have, Miss Innes.”

  “Emmy’s killer was a man,” said Nate. “A male dancer.”

  “No.” Sigrid shook her head slowly. “Ginger Judson told us Saturday afternoon that Emmy almost laughed out loud when the jack-o’-lantern first came onstage, even before he’d begun to pantomime Eric Kee’s style. Emmy laughed because she had seen Cliff Delgado use his wife’s paint mask as a burlesque codpiece and knew that Rikki had stuffed the mask down the front of her tights in order to disguise her sex. Emmy thought it was more fun and games and she died for it.

  “When you doused the lights, Miss Innes ran off stage right, then immediately doubled back between the screen and the wall so she’d be in her right place when the lights came back on. As she ran, she removed the mask and pumpkin head and flung them out in the passage where they were kicked under the stairs in all the confusion.” Rikki Innes had folded her arms upon the low table and buried her face. Her pale hair fanned out on the table around her.

  “Rikki?” Nate touched her shoulder gently. “Rikki? But you loved Emmy.”

  She nodded without lifting her head.

  “You loved her, Rikki Why would you kill her?”

  She raised her face to him then and that delicate oval was blotched and puffy “I loved you more, Nate, and she thought you’d killed Mandy”

  “But I didn't!” he said and exasperation mingled with raw grief in his voice. Then disbelief and horror swept over him. “Oh God, Rikki! Not Mandy, too?”

  “I had to, Nate. She saw you with a camera pressed against that hole and figured out what you were taking pictures of. It scared her. And it scared me when she told me. Suddenly, all I could think of was how you always had more time for the children than you had for me.”