7 Madness in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  “She’s this way,” he said, giving me hope.

  * * *

  I was well aware of the two kinds of rooms in the LPPD building, one for witnesses and the other for suspects. Bebe was in the windowless, uncarpeted version. She looked as I would have expected after a rough few days making a last stand against City Hall and spending half a morning in police custody, whether Skip called it that or not. Her long hair was pulled back and held together with a rubber band. I knew I had at least two of Maddie’s scrunchies in my purse and wondered if I should offer one to Bebe.

  “My brother send you?” she asked, making it clear that she wasn’t the one who’d made the request to see me.

  “Jeff is concerned, like all of us, Bebe.” Uninvited, I took a seat opposite her. The cop’s seat, I thought.

  “Tell Jeff I’m okay. I didn’t do anything, though I kinda wish I did.”

  I hoped she hadn’t expressed that sentiment to the police. I thought of reminding her that a man was dead by someone’s hand and flip remarks weren’t going to be appreciated by anyone.

  “I’m sure you don’t mean that,” I offered. “But I can see why you’re stressed—”

  “Who says I’m stressed?”

  I bit my lip and tried another expression of sympathy for her plight and added a word of comfort I had no right to speak. “I’m sure this will all be straightened out quickly.”

  Bebe shrugged. “Whatever.”

  It was a good thing I was used to Bebe’s crusty manner or I might have thought she didn’t want my help.

  “Would you mind answering a couple of questions?”

  “You sound like the cops. They’re also pretending I have a choice. They’re saying there are fingerprints on the vase, the one Palmer was killed with. And they’re expecting them to be mine.” Bebe blew out her breath as if she had just taken a drag on a cigarette. “Of course my fingerprints are on the vase. Like I told them, my prints would be all over the place in the store. Especially on the vases. I’m a ceramics artist. A potter. I wanted to check out the new vases, look at the features, see where they were made and all. We’ve had practically free rein of the store for the last month.” She paused and rolled her eyes. “Really big of them SuperKrafts VIPs.”

  “So your fingerprints could have gotten on the vase at any time.”

  Bebe opened her palms to me. “Duh.”

  “When was the last time you saw Craig Palmer?” I asked, apparently unable to stop sounding like a cop or a lawyer.

  “Never met him.”

  Another line I hoped she hadn’t used with the police, who could easily verify her meeting him, albeit briefly, yesterday at the store. I needed another tack. I reviewed the events of last evening in my mind to pinpoint a time for when Palmer’s body had been found. I recalled that Skip had received the notice when he was at my house, a little after eleven P.M. If the vase that killed him had been wielded by a person and not by Mother Nature via a three-point-one, the murder could have taken place any time between the end of the late afternoon meeting and about ten forty-five at night. I decided to use the shaker as a benchmark, until further notice.

  “Bebe, where were you at the time of the earthquake?” I asked.

  “Why are you still questioning me?”

  “I’m trying to help—”

  “Did I ask for your help?”

  “Bebe, your brother and your friends”—I was guessing here—“are worried and want to help you. Is there anything you can tell me about last evening, when the man you never met was killed?” Two could play the sarcasm game.

  “Look, just tell Jeff not to worry about me. That’s the only reason you’re here.” I figured she meant that’s why she’d agreed to see me. “Anything else is none of your business.”

  Bebe was right. In fact, Bebe had a more realistic view of my alleged role in this investigation than anyone else. I was not a cop, simply the aunt of a cop, and if all she’d wanted was a messenger between her and her brother, that was that.

  “Okay, Bebe. I understand that you don’t want my help,” I said, standing up. I headed for the door, sure that Bebe would call me back. But I didn’t hear the “Wait, wait,” that I’d heard so often in TV interview scenes where the cops fake out the witness. Bebe was willing to take her chances without intervention. I hoped that her next visitor would get more cooperation. For now, I had no choice but to leave.

  I opened the door and nearly ran into Megan Sutley and Leo Murray. They’d been walking down the hallway, headed to interview rooms I knew were more plush than the one Bebe had been consigned to. We all apologized for our parts in the collision and each expressed our surprise and dismay at Craig Palmer’s murder.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Megan said, a light scent of lavender wafting in the air between us. “I’m waiting for word from Corporate on whether we should go ahead with the Grand Opening, or just have a soft opening, you know, no fanfare.”

  “Works for me,” Leo said, towering over the petite Megan. His attire was casual but not off-the-rack, and not from one of many nearby sports clothing outlets.

  “Then there are all the other projects back at the head office and around the country,” Megan said. “Craig was overseeing an expansion in North Carolina”—I couldn’t help wondering if they were expanding into a row of perfectly good small stores—“a potential new store in Nevada, some new contracts…”

  “I imagine it will take a while to fill his position,” I said.

  I heard a “Yes” from Megan and a “Not really” from Leo, at about the same time.

  Leo shrugged. “Frankly, I’m expecting that Corporate will call me back to New York any minute. I’m ready to step up.” He looked over Megan’s head and past my shoulder at an officer at the end of the corridor. “I think I heard my name,” he said. “I’m in Interview Two.” Leo sauntered down the hallway, his “Excuse me” barely a mumble.

  From the way Megan screwed up her mouth, I gathered that she wasn’t a fan of Leo Murray. It was hard to see whom she was a fan of, since Craig’s absence through death didn’t seem to rattle her as it had Catherine. It was possible that she was looking forward to a boss who treated her less like a servant, as I’d witnessed yesterday.

  “Have you and Leo worked together a long time?” I asked.

  “Me and Leo, no. I’ve worked for Craig forever. Whatever he says, Leo’s not cut out for the business at the level Craig operated on. He’s better off…” Megan stopped and cleared her throat.

  “In a small town like this?” I was getting a little tired of New Yorkers, though I used to be one and I loved the city.

  “I didn’t mean anything negative, Mrs. Porter. Just”—she stopped and put her hand on the door to Interview Three—“Oh, this is me,” she said. “I’m supposed to wait in here. I already talked to a couple of cops. I don’t know what I can add. I didn’t see Craig after about six o’clock when the meeting broke up. I guess he stayed behind and”—she frowned and shook her head—“you know.”

  “And an earthquake hit,” I said. “Were you someplace where you could feel it?” Pretty smooth, if I did say so myself.

  “I was back at the hotel, if you can call it that. The KenTucky Inn.” She covered her mouth to stifle laughter. “Sorry, I know it’s all about Abraham Lincoln around here, and I don’t mean to make fun of it, but…”

  “We all agree with you on that one,” I said. “It’s the silliest name in the roll books of silly names.” I meant it. Although the innkeepers (a term they preferred to hoteliers), Loretta and Mike Olson, were good friends of mine, I cringed every time I recommended the inn to an out-of-town guest. Apparently they’d told their seven-year-old son that he could name the inn (as luck would have it, at the time his class was reading about the humble birth of Honest Abe in a log cabin in Kentucky) and they felt they had to honor the promise. I didn’t know which was worse, the pun on Lincoln’s birth state or the mid-word uppercase letter. Maybe that’s where SuperKrafts go
t the idea to come here in the first place. The land of quirky spelling. But the place was close to downtown and charming. And at least for now, it hadn’t been taken over by a chain.

  “It was my first earthquake and pretty scary,” Megan continued. “The coffeemaker and the ice bucket shook, and a glass broke.”

  “Was Leo with you?”

  “No, he stayed behind with Craig. Anyway, he’s in San Jose where Craig was, in a real hotel—oh, there I go again—I mean, a bigger hotel. The guys don’t like small, cozy places. By the way, do you have these earthquakes often?”

  “Not as often as the news might lead you to believe.”

  “The first one can be unsettling,” Skip chimed in, approaching from behind me.

  Megan shuddered, but her simultaneous smile took the edge off her reaction. “You got that right,” she said, and entered the room.

  Skip addressed me in a low voice. “Beverly and Maddie are waiting for you in my cubicle.” I supposed it wouldn’t have been cool for him to refer to Bev as “Mom” within earshot of an official witness.

  “I’m on my way,” I said. I was tempted to pinch his cheek in retaliation for all the grief he’d given me lately, but lucky for him, I was in an accommodating mood. Also, he slipped into Interview Three to join Megan before I could make my move. Smart guy.

  * * *

  “We want to hear everything, Grandma,” Maddie said.

  Bev smiled. “We certainly do,” she said, emphasizing “we” for Maddie’s benefit.

  “Did you mail your letter?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. And Aunt Beverly showed me where they keep all the cars she helps them drag in from the street. They’re not stolen or anything, except some of them might be, but they’re all abandoned. Like, the owner walked away because the engine wouldn’t start, or something. Or sometimes, they’re just lost. Right, Aunt Bev?”

  So what if Maddie was avoiding my question. I looked at Bev who gave me a slight nod, which I took to mean that she’d seen the addressee on Maddie’s letter. I’d get the scoop later from my peer. Hooray! Good old (that is, the young bride) Bev, sensing that I’d want to know about the letter without my mentioning it.

  Bev glanced at her watch. “It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning, too early for ice cream.”

  I thought about my promise to Jeff and my disappointing visit with Bebe. “Who’s up for a video game?” I asked.

  * * *

  The light ping of Video Jeff’s door was the same alert he’d always had, left over from before his remodel using SuperKrafts money. Much of the interior was different, though dim light still prevailed. Instead of tripping over boxes and remotes in a cluttered, crowded space, I’d entered a neatly laid-out store. One wall was lined with used games for various brands of equipment; the center of the store held rows of bins with what looked like new shrink-wrapped packages. Jeff had set up monitors with headsets in one corner of the store—the modern version of the pinball machine—and that’s where the wide-eyed Maddie was headed.

  Jeff greeted Maddie first. “Hey, Ms. Porter, guess what? You are the one-hundredth person to walk in that door today,” he said.

  “One hundred? Already?” Maddie asked.

  “You bet,” Jeff answered. “And every day I give a prize to the one-hundredth person.”

  I noticed the heads of four young boys turn in our direction, but Jeff ignored them and tended to Maddie. He tore off a receipt slip, the old-fashioned kind that most Springfield Boulevard retailers still used, whether to impress the tourists or to avoid buying and having to learn new equipment, I didn’t know. He wrote on the lined paper: ONE HOUR FREE FOR ANY GAME. At the bottom next to Total, he wrote PAID IN FULL TO 100TH GUEST.

  “Wow,” Maddie said, grinning. She thanked Jeff and stood in the middle of the store spinning around to decide which direction she’d run to first. The boys, meanwhile, had returned to their own games. If they wondered about the new hundredth-visitor policy, they didn’t say.

  Bev had begged off the field trip to Video Jeff’s. “The life of a civilian volunteer is a hard one,” she’d said. “I have phone duty during the regular girl’s breaks and lunch hour. Who knows what favorite pet has been lost? Or what parking ticket was totally, totally unfair?”

  Jeff was left with me and a few intensely occupied teens and preteens. “Bebe throw you out?” Jeff asked.

  Wise little brother, I thought. “She’s trying to stay independent, counting on her innocence to bring her home.”

  “We all know how well that works,” Jeff said, leading me to wonder if he’d had his own bad experience with the police.

  “She looks good,” I lied. “They haven’t charged her, so there’s not much else to do.”

  “One of her neighbors called me. The police were at her house with a search warrant. I ran over there, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. Do you think I should get her a lawyer?”

  “It couldn’t hurt to have one on standby, just in case.”

  “Well, I appreciate you going over there, Mrs. Porter. She sent me away after about two minutes.” Now, you tell me, I thought. “I’m sure everyone is always asking you for favors because of…”

  I could tell Jeff was embarrassed to admit he was trying to use my connections to the police department to his advantage. I needed to start collecting these admissions and show them to Skip.

  “My superior intelligence?” I teased.

  Jeff laughed harder than I would have liked. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “How did you fare in the earthquake, by the way? Anything damaged?” I asked.

  “No damage, just a lot of fallen boxes.” He pointed to the wall of used games. “But they were a little banged up anyway, so no big deal.”

  “Were you in the store at the time?”

  “Just closing up.”

  While a group of young boys came into the store (no special prize for numbers one hundred and one through one hundred and five), I mentally reviewed the alibis I’d collected unofficially for the time of Craig Palmer’s murder, reciting them to myself in preparation for writing down the list as soon as I could. Catherine and Megan were in their rooms at the KenTucky Inn; Jeff was closing up his shop; Leo was still at the store when Megan left and could have gone to his hotel in San Jose eventually. He also might have killed Craig first, since they’d been the only two left in the building.

  How handy for me that I could limit the suspects to a small pool of people. How tough for Skip and the LPPD that they had no such luxury. I imagined a whiteboard in a meeting room at the station with photos of everyone who had crossed paths with Craig Palmer, here, in New York City, in his travels. My head spun. I thought of former girlfriends who might have held a grudge, disgruntled employees, unsatisfied customers of SuperKrafts all over the country, unhappy citizens of Lincoln Point. How far back would investigators have to go to find people with means, motive, and opportunity?

  I made a note to ask Skip to keep his promise of details on why Palmer’s death was declared a murder and not an accident. It would have been so much easier if we could simply say, “The earthquake did it.”

  I found Maddie, surrounded by several boys, all competing for a score that I was afraid involved a high body count.

  “Time to go,” I said, having to use my classroom voice. Loud and authoritative.

  “I haven’t used up my hour,” Maddie shouted back.

  “There’s no expiration date. You can come back any time,” Jeff said.

  Something told me she’d claim every minute of her prize.

  Jeff walked us outside. “Sometimes it gets too noisy in there even for me,” he remarked. He looked down Springfield Boulevard, toward the police station, toward the jail. “But I guess it’s better than a lot of places.”

  No kidding.

  Chapter 7

  When Sadie’s daughter showed up to work at eleven she found Maddie, Bev, and me on the bench outside the family-run ice cream shop. “You should have knocked. My mom is in th
ere,” she said, her cherry-colored uniform dress on a hanger, draped over her arm.

  But we were comfortable, still not dreadfully hot, and Bev had joined us for wedding talk. Skip was correct in that his mother did seem to be making up for the brief ceremony with his dad. For this wedding, Bev was going all out, with a caterer, a baker (both local independents, she assured us), and about one hundred and fifty guests.

  “It was impossible to trim it down,” Bev had said while we were making up the mailing list.

  “Between you and Nick, you must know every cop and cop’s wife,” I’d said.

  “And every felon and felon’s accomplice,” Bev chuckled. “But don’t worry, I’m seating you and Henry far away from them. By the way, how are you and Henry?”

  “We’re both quite healthy, thank you,” I said.

  “No, I mean, how are you and Henry?” This time she’d crossed her index and middle fingers, and wore a silly smile above them.

  I gave her a silent, silly smile back.

  Maddie, sitting between us now, in front of Sadie’s, repeated her assertion that she was too old to be a flower girl and she didn’t want to be a bridesmaid and wear a dress, but she wanted some role in the wedding.

  “You can be our photographer,” Bev said.

  “Don’t you have a real photographer?” Maddie asked.

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know everyone the way you do. He wouldn’t know who’s really important, like your mom and dad, for example.”

  “And Grandma.”

  Bev slapped her forehead and smiled. “And Grandma. How could I forget Grandma.” I smiled back and bowed from my seated position.

  “I can make a movie with my phone,” Maddie said.

  “Wow, that would be great,” Bev said. “So we’re all set.”