I’d decided to let June talk before confronting her about Zoe’s alibi.
“Tell me about Zoe,” I began. “I’ve met her only two or three times and that was in a crowd.”
June nodded. “At Irene’s shower and then the wedding last year. Not her best moments.”
I remembered Zoe’s rich chestnut hair, how she was June’s height but much chunkier (but then, nearly everyone but Maddie was chunkier than June). Mostly, I remembered how intoxicated Zoe had gotten. And how loud.
“You’ve been friends for a long time?”
Another halfhearted nod. “Zoe’s a little younger than me, like three years. I was actually best friends with her older sister first, but she died. It was a car crash and Heddy and her parents were killed. It was awful.” June took a breath and, I was afraid, a moment to relive that pain. “So we kind of adopted Zoe. Then Zoe went into tech writing like me and we got even closer and I got her her first job in Chicago.”
Lourdes arrived with our order. It didn’t seem right to eat my brownie while June was fasting and looking like even the smell of chocolate might turn her stomach, and the lady outside Willie’s might be starving in spite of her normal attire. I wrapped the brownie in a napkin and took a sip of my coffee.
I wasn’t trying to keep track of the “crazy lady,” but she was smack in the middle of my field of view as I looked at June. I felt she was sizing me up, even trying to hear our conversation. I knew it was June’s state that had me on edge, but I was glad when the woman finally wandered off to the left.
June went back to her story. “And then I came out here and then Zoe did, and now we’re working at the same company again. So I guess I’ve kind of been her mentor as well as her family, except she’s now in management. She’s a go-getter, always knew she didn’t want to stay in the ranks very long. She knows how to network, for sure. She’s a lot like Brad in that way. They know how to get what they want.”
Except Brad got himself murdered, which June seemed to have forgotten for the moment. “She sounds like an excellent resource,” I said, staying as neutral as possible.
“Uh-huh. It’s been great having her in Lincoln Point. She lives across Springfield Boulevard from you, a couple of houses down from where Linda lives, in those new condos.”
The condos that Linda hated because they brought “loud young Generation Whatever Letter” to the neighborhood. “And Brad?”
“Zoe’s had lots of boyfriends. Way more than me. But she was really in love with Brad. I could never figure out what she saw in him. He was very selfish. I got the feeling he’d do anything to get ahead in the art world.”
I noted the difference—in June’s mind, Brad was “selfish,” but Zoe was “a go-getter” and admirably ambitious.
“But”—June made a helpless, palms-up gesture—“he said he loved her, too, and was over his ex. He came out here to be with Zoe, a few months ago.”
“He was married?”
“For a short time, to this woman, Rhonda, who’s still in Chicago. They were young.”
They’re still young, I thought. Never mind that I’d already been married to Ken a year by that age. We were exceptionally mature for our ages. I smiled at the idea.
I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes since I dropped Maddie off. I was sure she was well aware of the time and wouldn’t be a minute late. I needed time to get my questions out to June, but she showed no signs of slowing down her narrative.
“You can’t imagine how badly Rhonda took the breakup. She’s Catholic and doesn’t believe in divorce. In fact, she assumes they’re still married. She writes him letters and signs ‘your loving wife, Rhonda.’ Hello? The divorce has been final for months.”
“Do they have children?”
“No, and it’s a good thing they didn’t have any. Imagine putting kids through this. Zoe is very volatile, yes, but nothing compared to Rhonda. She went nuts, and threatened Brad several times. I was afraid she was going to go after Zoe, too.”
If I didn’t know June’s Chicago origins, I’d be able to tell from the flat a’s (such as in “Brad” and “after”), all the more pronounced when she was under stress, as now.
“Have the police interviewed Rhonda?” I asked.
“I hope so. She might be connected out here,” June said. I tried to picture a young woman named Rhonda in Chicago ordering a hit in Lincoln Point. Was divorce really worse than murder to Brad’s ex? “Or maybe she flew out here and did it herself. She’s the one they should be blaming, not Zoe.”
Neither of us mentioned that “the police” and “they” really was Skip, my nephew and her boyfriend.
I wondered where that nephew was at this moment. Not interviewing other suspects if he was sure Zoe was guilty.
June seemed ready to answer anything, if not with a lot of energy.
“Will Zoe get bail?” (We won’t know until later in the week.)
“Does she have family in Chicago?” (No. Maybe a cousin, but very distant.)
“Does she have a lawyer?” (She’s broke and will probably have to have a public defender.)
Of course those were easy questions.
“June, were you with Zoe on Tuesday night?”
She bristled. No more cooperative demeanor. “Yes, I told you. We watched a bunch of Sex and the City reruns.”
The same words she used earlier. I remembered Skip’s mentioning how he could tell when someone was lying about an alibi. “No one says things exactly the same way twice unless they’ve rehearsed it,” he’d said.
If that was true, then June should have said, “We watched television,” or “We had popcorn and watched TV.” Not the very same “bunch of Sex and the City reruns” she used last time. I doubted Skip would approve of this slap-dash application of a scrap of dinner conversation.
I worked on my coffee, not as good as it would have been with a complementary treat. I fingered the paper napkin that was wrapped around my brownie. A whiff of chocolate rose up and I was tempted to eat it. Not the time, however.
I looked at June, who was sad-faced, having just re-alibied her best friend. I braced myself. “A security camera at the Rutledge Center says otherwise, June.”
“Well, it’s wrong.” June’s voice was louder than normal, attracting the attention of a table of four businessmen near us. They went back to their laptops and spreadsheets in a few seconds, except for one who couldn’t seem to take his eyes off June. “Zoe was with me.”
“You’re not helping your friend by lying.” I whispered this, hoping June’s voice would come down in volume to match mine.
“I’m not lying,” she said, with force. But I could tell her confidence was fading.
A moment later, forty minutes into my hour without Maddie, Skip walked in. Facing the door, I saw him first. He took long strides and sat down before June knew he was there.
“Did you follow me?” June asked.
“In fact I did.” A heavy tone.
June started to get up, but Skip put his hand on her shoulder, leaned over, and kissed her cheek. She sat back down and folded her arms across her chest.
“Don’t I matter to you at all, Skip?” she asked, looking at her water bottle, squeezing the plastic so it popped in and out of shape.
“I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t matter. Now, do you want to hear what we’ve got?”
I certainly did. I wondered if Skip were going to tell us something not known to the general public. It was hard not to feel privileged as the only aunt of a homicide detective. I thought ahead to the long-term prognosis for Skip and June. Certainly she was getting a taste of what it might be like to be married to a cop.
“What about Rhonda? Have you questioned her?” June asked, without waiting for Skip’s input.
“We’re working on it. She’s a real estate agent and works out of her house a lot. She calls into the office regularly but there’s no telling from where.”
“Her staff and colleagues don’t know where she is? Doesn�
�t that tell you something?”
“Not really. As far as they all know, she’s calling from home.”
“Hasn’t anyone seen her?”
“Not in the last couple of days. Chicago PD are trying to locate her.”
“Good. I hope they try hard. That’s where you should be looking. Is Zoe going to get bail? Not that she could even afford it unless we have a fund-raiser, but is she going to at least have that chance?”
“You know that’s not my call. It all depends on whether—”
June stood to leave, nearly knocking over her chair.
“Honey, I’d like to explain—”
But June stomped out, for the second time in as many days. Her last words were aimed at both of us. “Apparently I have to do this on my own.”
I looked at my watch, and then at Skip. “Maddie will be here in about ten minutes,” I said, allowing for the fact that Maddie would surely be early. If she knew her Uncle Skip was here, she’d race to his side.
“What am I going to do about this, Aunt Gerry? I have to do my job.”
I offered him the brownie. When in doubt, feed, was my motto. The luscious treat was gone in two bites. Good. He looked forlorn, as last night, but wasn’t so far gone today that he was fasting.
“What do you have on Zoe?” I asked. “If you can tell me,” I added with elaborate deference.
He smiled. A welcome change.
“Brad Goodman was stabbed to death and Zoe’s prints are on the knife. At least her prints are among many that are on the knife.”
I cringed at the image. “The same one that was used to slash the paintings?”
Skip grinned. “Of course you’d know about the paintings. But, no, not the same knife. That knife was wiped clean.”
I explained my errand for Mary Lou. “What kind of knife was the murder weapon, if I may ask?” I’d never been on such good behavior.
“It’s an artist’s knife, I guess you’d call it. The kind you’d have in a tool kit.”
“Brad’s?”
“Maybe. We don’t really have the full story on whether the knife we found with the body is actually the murder weapon. It looks like it, but test results aren’t back.”
“If it belongs to Brad, Zoe could have handled the knife when she visited Brad in the work area, right?”
“There’s more. We know she was in the building, from the security camera.”
I gave him a weak smile and a slight nod.
“You know about that, huh?”
“I happened to run into a couple of the staff.” Now that I thought of it, I didn’t really know what “staff” function Stephanie Cameron performed at the Rutledge Center. I’d only guessed that Ed Villard was an artist from his paint-splattered clothes.
“And I suppose the timeline matches with the time of death and all.” I was throwing jargon around, I knew, but my attention was still on the door and the inevitable curtailing of crime talk that Maddie’s presence would bring.
“Their camera system is not that great, but there is one working that’s focused on the work area. Zoe was in the building around eleven o’clock on Monday night.”
“Did she enter with a key?”
“Hard to tell.” Skip shook brownie crumbs from the napkin, into his hand, and then into his mouth. Suddenly I was hungry and dipped into the cookies-to-go bag, taking potluck: an oatmeal raisin with nuts. Good choice, but then I’d bought only my favorites.
“And by Tuesday afternoon, Zoe was in jail? That’s pretty quick,” I said after a healthy (or not) bite.
“Her prints were in our own local system from some substitute teaching she did. Otherwise we’d still be waiting. You know the state of crime labs.”
I assured Skip that I did know the sorry condition of city and state forensics capabilities, and motioned him to get on with the story.
“We had the knife, the video, and several witnesses who said they’d been fighting lately.”
That last was news to me, something June had neglected to mention. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“I guess I’ll have to buy some candy and flowers.”
“I meant with Zoe.”
“I know,” he said, and rose to leave.
He would have gotten away with the last word, except for the arrival of his first cousin once-removed.
Maddie’s “Uncle Skip, Uncle Skip” brought another curious look from the businessmen.
Skip scooped her up. “Sorry, squirt, I just ate the last brownie.”
“We’re going for ice cream. Come with us.”
“Gotta go to work,” he said and was gone in a flash.
I knew what was coming. Maddie put her hands on her hips and gave me one of her comic glares, half kidding, half serious.
“Grandma?”
“He just got here, I swear. I was with June almost the whole time.”
“You’d better tell me everything.”
“Of course. Of course. Did you have a good time at Rosie’s?”
“Yeah, she let me use her computer.”
“That was nice of her.”
I had a flashback to a newspaper article I’d read on how easy it was for kids to see inappropriate videos on the Internet. I made a note to ask Rosie if she had a way to filter anything offensive from her system. I longed for the days when Richard was little and all I had to worry about was whether he’d remember to wear his bike-riding helmet and look both ways crossing the street.
Maddie and I agreed that ice cream cones to go would be the best bet today since we had a lot of projects waiting at home.
“No time for table service,” I told Sadie, who’d opened her shop right around the time Ken and I arrived in Lincoln Point, three decades ago. We thought she did it just for us.
“I thought you were retired,” she said to me, her chubby hands digging into the freezer. “And you don’t have time to sit for ice cream?”
“We hope you never retire,” Maddie said. “We love it here.”
I knew she was sincere, but it turned out to be a good move on her part—Sadie obliged her with an extra-heaping waffle cone. Maddie had decided to try a new flavor that Sadie called Honest Abe’s Beard. It was a special licorice ice cream recipe, Sadie explained. I passed on it. Ice cream flavors were one area where Maddie was willing to branch out and I wasn’t. I really wanted plain chocolate chip, but that seemed unpatriotic on a day so close to Lincoln’s birthday, so I agreed to a small cone of “Galesburg” (for Galesburg, Illinois, the site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate), which was French vanilla with strawberries and blueberries. In case anyone lost track of which debate would be reenacted in a particular year, Sadie named her special flavor for February to remind us.
During our walk to and from Sadie’s, I’d brought out my usual thesaurus of euphemisms as I told Maddie about my meetings with June and Skip. All Maddie needed to know about the case that was striking close to home, I reasoned, was that a young man had died and her Uncle Skip had arrested a young woman who might have been responsible and she was now in jail. I threw in the last note in case she needed assurance that the killer wasn’t roaming the streets. I wondered about that myself. If Zoe really was innocent, then . . . I looked up and down the side streets as we walked to the car.
For Maddie, I wanted the violence to sound more like a picnic gone wrong—due to a heavy downpour, a leaky cooler, or a takeover by an army of ants—but soon to be put right.
Buckled into the backseat of the car, Maddie continued asking questions. “Is that it?” she asked in an accusing tone when I’d failed to add new information. In the rearview mirror I could see her frown. I wondered if it were due partly to the taste of the awful-looking charcoal-colored ice cream.
“That’s it.”
“You’re not telling me everything. I already knew everything you told me and I know it’s June’s friend who’s in jail.”
“How do you know that?”
“I couldn’t sleep last night when you guys
were talking in the living room.”
I feigned astonishment. “You eavesdropped?”
“You were talking too loud.”
Maddie’s bedroom was in the opposite corner of the house from the living room, on the other side of my large atrium. Even if we’d been shouting, she’d have had a hard time hearing us. I pictured her squatted down in her L.A. Dodgers (Tigers? Panthers? I couldn’t keep the team names straight) pajamas, hiding behind my ficus.
“Then you heard everything there is to know. All that time in Willie’s today, June was just telling me how sad she was that her friend is in jail.”
Which was not far from the truth.
Chapter 6
I parked on the street in front of my house since we were the first ones to arrive. Later when the “good” vehicles were safe in the garage, I’d pull my car into the driveway.
June’s house, next door, looked different today, its paint a duller green, her lawn showing patches of brown. What power the mind has.
What wasn’t my imagination, however, was that her trash containers were toppled over, their contents spilled onto her driveway, two lawns away from mine. There hadn’t been much of a breeze today, let alone a wind that could have forced the heavy containers to the ground. I envisioned a careless group of school children bumping into them, accidentally or through malicious mischief. I couldn’t remember any other incident of this magnitude on our quiet street. Just occasional litter, like a soft-drink cup or candy wrapper I assumed had been dropped by a jogger or dog walker.
“What are you going to do about it?” Maddie asked, dragging her backpack to the front door.
“I’m going to change my clothes and clean up June’s driveway,” I said.
“I meant the case, Grandma.”
“I know.”
In truth, I’d almost forgotten what her question referred to. Maddie’s earlier inquisition about the case had been interrupted by an accident in the car with her ice cream cone. A large portion of the ice cream had fallen to the floor and we’d spent some time cleaning it up at the gas station on the way home. I wondered how accidental it was. I’d seen her scowling face as she nibbled at the black globs. I did notice what a wonderful miniature tar pit she’d created on the floor of my car, and filed the image away for another project.
Malice in Miniature Page 6
