“I didn’t say that.”
Still five minutes till Dolores was due. Time for another call, this one outgoing, to Beverly, Ken’s sister and Skip’s mother. Also, surrogate grandmother to Maddie, civilian volunteer to the Lincoln Point PD, and all-around best friend. Beverly had just one flaw, and it wasn’t her fault. She’d had scarlet fever as a child and still suffered the effects on her heart. It was cause for great worry for me, though Beverly played it down as much as she could.
“I figured you’d be calling,” she said. “Only a cop’s mother gets the scoop before you do.”
I gave Beverly a rundown of my morning and afternoon. “I have no idea what Dolores wants with me,” I said.
“Other than your help to clear her grandmother? You’re getting a reputation, you know. Remember last summer?”
“That was different. I don’t know anything about this victim. I’m staying out of this.”
“Right.”
Why did everyone think I was an investigator? A retired teacher, yes. A crafter, volunteer tutor, fund-raiser, yes. I’d done my master’s thesis at San Jose State on Shakespeare, not Sherlock Holmes. Just because I helped the LPPD once didn’t mean I was going to stick my nose in every case.
“How much do you know?” I asked Beverly.
“Ha. Actually, not much. Just that the victim was Carl Tirado and he worked for a company that supplied gardeners for all the nursing homes in the county.”
“You’re right. That’s not much. Except for his full name, I already knew that.”
“Sorry, I’ll keep you posted. I’ll be manning the phones at the station later and will keep my ears open.”
“You always do. Thanks.”
“Are you ready for Maddie? I’ll bet your crime-solving activities set you back on your schedule.”
“Uh-huh. I was hoping you could pick up the ice cream cake at Sadie’s shop, and tell Sadie I’ll take Susan Giles’s room box to her tomorrow. And also, I left my little playroom in your laundry area when I was showing it to you. Facing reality here, I’m not going to do any more with it, so can you take that to the Toy Box?”
“No problem. See you tonight. Can’t wait to see Maddie. And hear how you won’t have investigated.”
I hung up without a word. Just a smile.
Chapter 5
It was nearly two o’clock when Dolores arrived. She beckoned me to her silver Mercedes. (Evidently a brief ride in my Ion was enough for her for one day.) I sat in her passenger seat, admittedly more comfortable than mine, possibly even more so than my living-room furniture. I urged her to try to calm down and tell me what she knew so far.
“I got the call from the police about twelve thirty this afternoon, just after I returned to my office.” Dolores rubbed her hands together as if she were freezing. “It’s not that I left my grandmother to go to a two-martini lunch, Geraldine,” she explained. “I had this memo from Sacramento, with a very firm deadline. And one of my techs is out sick, and I was afraid Steve Talley would preempt me on this as usual, and on and on.” Dolores threw up her hands in surrender.
I hoped I never did anything to engender this kind of guilt in my son or granddaughter. I thought of giving Richard a call and offering blanket immunity for anything that might come up in the future. “What are the police charging her with, Dolores?”
“Nothing yet, but they think she—” She pulled a tissue from a holder attached to her visor and blew her nose. “— killed that man. It’s a ridiculous thought. Beyond ridiculous.”
“Did you or Sofia know the victim? The gardener?”
“No. Who looks at a gardener, right? They say he worked at the Mary Todd only a few times in the nearly three years my grandmother has lived there. She’s in custody now, Geraldine. I got her the best lawyer in Santa Clara County. If she’s formally arrested, there’ll be a bail hearing, but the lawyer’s not hopeful about getting her released. He says they’ll assume she’s too hard to control. She’s old, Geraldine. What are they talking about?”
We sat surrounded by the dumpy project buildings. I wondered which one was the Munizes’ old residence.
“I worked so hard to get us out of this place, Geraldine. We barely made it out before it became too dangerous to live here. There’d be a drug bust at least a couple of times a week, and some of our friends were afraid to visit us.”
“That must have been tough, with a child especially.” Maybe this was my role, Geraldine as therapist. I could do that for her.
Dolores dug in her large purse, pulled out her wallet and showed me a photograph of Sofia. A formal portrait of a strong, stately woman, with a photographer’s clouds swirling in the background. A far cry from the woman I’d seen in her hospital bed earlier today.
I remembered the first time I met her, when she signed up for my Mary Todd class. The first week, she made a tiny Nativity scene out of origami figures. I was never a Catholic, but I had to admit, Christian stories were wonderful and a great source for spectacular miniature scenes.
“I want to build the Vatican,” Sofia had said to me one Friday morning. “Can you help me?”
“Of course.” Only other miniaturists would understand that we weren’t talking about a multiyear life-size construction project requiring scaffolding and tons of cement.
Sofia’s version of the Vatican was progressing nicely. She’d started with the two mushroom-shaped fountains and the obelisk that defined the square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, molding them carefully with modeling clay. We consulted a large art book she had and I helped her figure out the height of the obelisk and the distances between the fountains, in order to keep the scene on track for scale.
“Dolores took me here,” she’d said, blessing herself. “I had an audience with the Holy Father.”
I imagined that Dolores made every effort to fulfill all her grandmother’s dreams.
Dolores had been staring at Sofia’s photograph.
“What are you going to do next, Dolores?” I asked. (Translation: Why am I here with you?)
“I thought we could drive around a little. Show this photo and see if someone remembers seeing her. Maybe I’ll find something the police missed. I can’t just do nothing. And you’re so . . . sensible, Geraldine. I could use the support.”
This didn’t seem the moment to tell her I was pressed for time. “Let’s do it,” I said.
Dolores pulled out of her spot and headed south, away from downtown, to a part of Nolin Creek Pines I’d never visited. The buildings seemed to get more decrepit, the cars more battered, the farther away we drove from the civic center. In the middle of the afternoon, the place was deserted and bleak. Dolores seemed to get older and more drawn with each building we passed. Her scarf was crooked on her neck but she made no effort to straighten it. Her makeup was smudged, and her hair, neatly turned under this morning, now fell in disarray.
As we passed Arbor Road, I caught a glimpse of yellow crime scene tape. Dolores seemed to know well in advance not to turn down that street.
“There’s the bodega she used to go to,” she said, turning onto Spruce. “They knew my grandmother very well. Let’s go in.”
Why not, I thought, feeling like Dolores and I were cop partners on a prime-time TV show. “Have you seen this woman?” we’d ask, holding out her photograph. “Let’s canvass the area,” one of us would say.
I made a resolution to reread a classic, perhaps Paradise Lost, and give up television crime dramas.
For the next half hour, Dolores and I covered the bodega, Sofia’s bank, the clinic she frequented, two pharmacies, and a check-cashing place. Each time, we exited with no more information than when we entered. I knew that Dolores was hoping against hope that someone would provide her with an alibi for Sofia, or an eyewitness to another killer. Or a miracle.
I noticed that every one of the institutions except the church had metal bars on the windows and doors. And yet Sofia had felt more like a prisoner in a gated community with a security checkpoint. Wh
at a hold our pasts have on us, I thought.
As we continued canvassing in the Mercedes, Dolores talked about her grandmother and her life. By the time the day was over, I thought, I’ll know the Munizes backward and forward.
She waved her hand to encompass the Nolin Creek Pines neighborhood. “Funny. I was so determined not to let my office know about Sofia’s disappearance, and now this whole neighborhood knows, and soon it will be all over the newspapers that she was taken away by the police.” (This was her musing between two fast-food restaurant stops, for queries, not for hamburgers, thank heavens.)
At last, I could segue to one of my basic questions. “Why didn’t you tell your colleagues at city hall, when they might have been able to help you this morning?”
Dolores slammed her hands against the gray leather steering wheel. “Because I’m selfish, that’s why. There’s a job opening coming up on the mayor’s personal staff. It would be a big promotion for me. I’d be the chief public information officer, Mayor Roberts’s right-hand woman. Remember Steve Talley? He and I are the most promising candidates. All I could think of was, I didn’t want anything to get in my way.”
“And if they thought your grandmother was unstable and ran off they’d think less of you?” It seemed quite a leap, but I’d never understood the inner workings of the political machine.
Dolores’s nod was accompanied by a sniffle. “Or that I’d be too busy to handle both a high-profile job and an ailing relative. Like a single mother, and I’ve already been through that phase of discrimination, thank you very much. You may think things are rosy now for women, Geraldine, but let me tell you, we’re still fighting battles in the workplace. We’re still debating whether a young woman should be hired if she seems to want children soon, or whether a mother can give enough attention to her job. Meanwhile, our boy Stevie Talley has three kids under twelve, and is on his third marriage, but no one ever brings that up in connection with his job. Neither one of us has a college degree, but no one brings that up about him, either.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Another wishy-washy therapist answer, but I didn’t know Dolores well enough to guess what she wanted to hear.
“He drives around in his Cadillacs—he has more than one—like he owns the world. And, if you ask me, though I can’t prove it, he’s addicted to prescription drugs. He broke his leg skiing a couple of years ago and never got over it, if you catch my drift. His eyes are like pinpoints at certain times of the day, and also he keeps his middle desk drawer locked.”
I’d never been close enough to Steve Talley to examine his pupils, and I didn’t see how securing his desk was so unusual—I’d kept my teacher’s desk at the high school locked just to protect my supply of chalk.
“Is that what you were arguing about this morning? I mean the job, not the pills or the Cadillacs.”
“No, that particular debate was about a specific development proposal for the town. One that would have a great effect on the Nolin Creek population especially. He calls it Talley’s Restoration Plan. I call it Talley’s Tally, as in votes and money.”
“I didn’t realize your job included matters of that nature.”
“It’s a small town, Geraldine. Lots of informal decision-making.One palm greasing another. Steve and I both manage offices in city hall. It’s an unwritten rule that the most creative, politically aggressive office manager is the next assistant to the mayor, and then up and up the ladder.
“And you both would like to be at the top of that ladder.”
“I’ve earned it, Geraldine. Unlike Steve, who’s trying to muster community support for this plan of his by using fear tactics. He’s appealing to voters who think the housing projects should be destroyed and turned into upscale condos and fancy shops and restaurants. Instead of a good cup of Mexican coffee, you’d have to buy four-dollar soy lattes. Wait until you see his model of the new neighborhood. He’s going to unveil it to the public at the ball.”
My ears perked up. “A model?”
“Not the kind like you make. Steve’s is computer-generated.”
I almost lost interest. I loved the real, physical models Ken and his staff used to create, with tiny buildings, streets, sidewalks, cars, and trees. On some scales the people would be no more than a half-inch tall. He’d never take them home, however. “I don’t want you putting tiny curtains on the windows,” he’d say.
Dolores had gone on to describe Steve’s (inferior, in my mind) model. “Anyway, you can go to any terminal in the city hall and click on it. It rotates in 3-D, if that’s what you call it. The plan is there, in living wood and paint.”
“And your plan?”
“My plan, which is boring, because it’s practical, is to clean up the neighborhood. Get a decent contractor in to repair the infrastructure.” She used her fingers to tick off. “The plumbing, the lighting, the streets. Pick up the garbage regularly. Get more cops there at all hours. Have after-school programs to give the kids something to do besides join a gang.”
I got it. “But that would cost money and all we’d have to show for it would be a safe neighborhood for poor people.”
“Not so sexy as new earth-toned condos that would rent for a fortune, is it?” Dolores asked. “But no matter what’s at stake, I still should never put my work ahead of my grandmother’s well-being. She raised me, Geraldine. She took care of me from when I was five years old and my parents died.”
“That must have been very hard for all of you. But you were responsible enough to take care of her when it was your turn, and you’ve certainly come to her aid now, doing everything you can.”
It would be hard to prove Dolores heard anything I said. She continued on her own thread. “I’ve told myself I’m not ashamed of her, but did I ever invite her to an office party? No. Or show her around my building? No.”
“That wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate anyway.”
Finally, I felt I’d paid my dues and earned the right to give a little advice. “Dolores, Sofia is still alive. If you think you want to do things differently there’s still time.”
She reached over and touched my hand. “Thank you, Geraldine, I knew you were the right person to ask for help.”
Now that I thought of it, that was good advice, and I made a note to see how I could apply it to my own life.
When we pulled up to my Ion, Dolores leaned over and hugged me. “Thanks, Geraldine. I have an appointment with the lawyer in a few minutes. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“Okay,” I said. But did I want to know? Dolores had gotten support from me; Sofia had a good lawyer; my nephew was the homicide detective on the case. Surely my work with the Munizes was finally over and I could go back to enjoying the holiday season.
Chapter 6
It was probably the grandmother in me, but I thought Maddie lit up the whole of San Jose International Airport.
Standing as close to the gate as security would allow, I was unashamed of the handful of balloons that bounced around my head. The largest one said Best Granddaughter. There was nothing I could do about the teddy bears frolicking through the letters in the message; I hoped Maddie wouldn’t notice immediately.
Maddie was still young enough to have to preboard on her end and deplane last in San Jose. A good thing since, as she ran toward me, her swinging backpack would have been a serious hazard in the crowd that poured out the doorway. I steeled myself for the impact and hugged her, remembering the days when I could scoop her up. I kissed the top of her red hair (which matched that of all the other Porters except me) and felt her nuzzle closer. A young woman in goth dress and enough silver jewelry to require its own tub on the security belt smiled at us, possibly remembering a similar incident in her former, pastel life.
Maddie and I had certain rituals for these arrivals. Before we went to baggage claim, we called her parents in L.A. This was less important now that Richard and Mary Lou were able to track her flight on the Internet, but we called anyway. We stepped aside, allowing what seem
ed like millions of other passengers to have their space. It was Thursday evening, not prime time for traveling, except that this close to Christmas, all bets were off.
Maddie took the lead, using my cell phone.
“I asked Santa for my own cell for Christmas,” she told me and winked. Then, “Hello, this is Madison Porter, reporting in.” A laugh. “Hi, Mom, I’m here. Yeah!” Pause. “Yup.” Pause. “Yup.” Pause. “Yup. Here’s Grandma.”
I assumed Maddie was “yupping” at warnings from her mother to be good, to eat her vegetables, to go to bed on time, and other things that weren’t a grandmother’s concern. Right now, she was so excited she skipped circles around me and hugged me again (causing my face to be bombarded momentarily with balloons) even as I had a few words on the phone with Mary Lou.
I handed over a bag of green and red foil-wrapped chocolate balls (another ritual, with the foil color appropriate to the season) and we headed toward Baggage Claim.
“Wait till you see what I made for the apartment, Grandma,” Maddie said. Meaning the replica of the first apartment Ken and I lived in, in the Bronx. “It’s sweet.”
By now I knew that sweet had a whole different meaning for Maddie from the way I used it. I guessed she’d picked it up from Skip, who explained to me that it now means tight or cool. Good thing I’m retired, I thought. English isn’t what it used to be.
“Do you want to tell me what you made, or surprise me?”
“Surprise.” (Which was no surprise.)
“Shall we do crafts first thing and skip the party with Aunt Beverly and Uncle Skip?”
Maddie didn’t spend a second believing I was serious. It was a huge turnabout for her that she even considered crafts worthy of her time. Before last summer she eschewed anythinggirl-like in favor of pastimes that required balls, sticks, and running around in protective gear.
Not that she liked pink yet, but I’d long since given up buying her frilly dresses anyway. Today she was in her usual jeans with a neon green hooded sweatshirt. The big question was what I could coax her into wearing to the Mary Todd Ball over the weekend, a family affair she’d never been to.
Mayhem in Miniature Page 5
