Maddie wanted to add some people, but I’ve never liked adding dolls to a scene. One tiny doll that was lifelike enough to make the scene work was very expensive, on the order of hundreds of dollars. And the less expensive ones had “fake woman” or “toy man” written all over them. It was possible to photograph a miniature scene in such a way that a viewer wouldn’t be able to tell it wasn’t life-size unless there were a ruler or a coin or some way to show scale. But add a plastic person with hollow, staring eyes, stiff limbs, and shiny plastic hair, and you could tell at a glance that the room wasn’t “real.”
I told Maddie as much of this as she could stand before giving up.
“Okay, okay, no people,” she said.
“But we can make it look like people have been here. We can add clothing, for example.”
“Like someone left his jacket behind.” (Maddie was a quick study.)
“Or his top hat, or a cane.”
“And notes from the speech.”
We got a start on all of the above and set the items aside to be added later.
We still had a stage to build. Ordinarily, I would have built that first, but I wanted to take advantage of Linda’s skills with vegetation and also give Maddie some fun things to make before pulling out the dull popsicle sticks and wood pieces for the platform.
We put together a four-by-seven platform relatively quickly and stained the wood. Once it was dry (Maddie hated the part where crafters sometimes had to wait a day between steps), we’d place it so that it was surrounded by trees. The stage would be raised three inches from the “ground.”
“That’s three feet, right?” I reminded Maddie, keeping her honest with respect to scale.
“Do you think the men could climb up that high?” she asked.
“Lincoln probably could, but Douglas was pretty short. Maybe there are stairs around the back, hidden by the trees.”
“And we don’t have to put them there. We can just say they’re there.”
I smiled. My granddaughter had grasped another wonderful thing about miniatures.
At dinner, Richard told us about a ten-year-old boy needing surgery for skiffy.
“That’s SCFE, slipped capital femoral epiphysis,” he explained, a structural defect of the hip that occurs in some children.
By dessert we’d heard about a baby born with clubfoot, another with acute torticollis, and preteens with three different kinds of spinal deformities. Richard rarely shared this kind of detail from his work life. It seemed obvious that he was trying to give a not-so-subtle message to his daughter: there are kids out there with real problems, much worse off than you are, with just a bout of homesickness that would be less than a dim memory in a few years.
Maddie ate her tarragon chicken without much comment during her father’s presentation. I’m not sure that trick ever worked when Richard was eleven, either.
Out of the blue, it seemed, Maddie had a story to tell. “You want to hear something really gross?” Maddie asked.
“I wasn’t telling you gross things,” Richard said. “I just want you to know what some kids have to deal with.”
Unlike her parents, I knew what was coming.
“I had to deal with a dead raccoon today.”
“That’s very sad,” Mary Lou said. “Where did you see it?”
Maddie’s eyes teared up. “Grandma can tell you. May I be excused?”
Maddie left and I told the story, with as little drama as possible.
“Is Maddie in some kind of danger here?” Richard asked, hearing between the lines.
“It won’t hurt her to see a few unpleasant things. It was just a prank,” Mary Lou said.
“What does Skip think?” Richard asked.
“That it was a prank,” I said. “But he sent the knife to the lab. You know Skip, erring on the side of caution.”
I was glad neither of them asked what I thought.
Mary Lou pulled me aside in the living room while Richard and Maddie took their turn at cleaning up the dishes.
“I put in an hour today at the Rutledge Center, working on my painting.”
“Are you making good progress?”
“As much as possible with all the talk about the murder. Everyone is caught up in it.”
“Of course.” I didn’t want to seem too eager.
“That Nan Browne is still talking about how her daughter should have gotten one of the commissions for a painting. Evidently she went so far as to ask the debate committee if Diana could replace Brad, since he’s . . . you know . . . gone. But I guess someone already claimed that spot.”
“Really?”
“It’s not completely decided, but everyone thinks Ed Villard will get the commission. He’s an old guy—”
“I met him.”
“Oops. I didn’t mean old old.” Mary Lou tried not to smile.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
“Well, yeah, there’s old, and then there’s just too old to be at this stage in his career.”
I patted her arm. “I get it.”
“Good, because we don’t think of you as old, Mom.” She patted my arm the way adult children do to their parents. She lowered her voice even further. “And also, I thought you might like to know that the crime-scene tape is down.”
I didn’t know what surprised me more—that the tape was down, that Mary Lou thought I should know, or that she thought she needed to whisper all this information to me.
I gave her a questioning look. She gave me a nudge. “You know, Mom, in case you wanted to look into things.”
I appreciated my daughter-in-law more every day, even if she did consider the prime of life “old.”
I sat in my atrium with a cup of tea long after my family had gone to bed. A murder in Lincoln Point had affected someone close to me and I had a hard time letting go of the idea that I could help.
Ordinarily I would engage in one of my sessions of “let’s get focused” (out loud, to myself), but a houseful of people was cramping my style. Or I would call Beverly, but she was out of range, emotionally, if not technically. I fell back on another technique and scribbled some notes. I wrote down key points, hoping that would suffice as a sensory way to organize my thoughts.
First topic heading: Mary Lou.
I knew Mary Lou kept her eye on community problems and was always willing to volunteer or to take a stand for a cause she thought was worthy. She worked at the polls on voting days and put in a few hours a week at a women’s shelter in Los Angeles. She’d already sought out a similar facility in Palo Alto for when she moved there. The last time I visited Southern California, she was organizing a fund-raiser to save a children’s breakfast program at a school in a poor neighborhood.
But I’d never known her to get involved in police work.
“You could look into things” played back in my mind. Was it the proximity of her cousin Skip in her life these last weeks that brought on this interest? Was my curious nature spilling over now that we lived together? I’d have to find a time to sit alone with her and see what, if anything, she meant by her comment.
Next: June Chinn. Promises aside, I wanted to help her. The sooner the fate of her friend was settled, one way or another, the sooner she’d be able to move on. And the sooner she and Skip could get back to their relationship. Unless it was too late for that. June had turned her back on him twice in twenty-four hours. It wasn’t like Skip to stick with a girlfriend once things got unpleasant in any way. I was surprised June had a second chance when he approached her at Willie’s. I wasn’t sure about a third.
The incident in June’s driveway nagged at me. Maybe I’d made too quick a leap from the knifed raccoon to Zoe Howard. What if the message had been for June herself? For now, I had to follow Skip’s lead and consider it unrelated either to June or to Zoe’s plight. After all, even if someone wanted to make a point or to get under Zoe’s skin, she was already in jail, and it was hard to ask for more than that if they wanted to in
timidate her.
There was also the remote possibility that June had killed the raccoon. She often got upset when they knocked the top off her trash container and upset everything in it that was neatly packaged. She’d be especially angry when they attacked her cats, but it was still all but impossible to imagine her plunging a knife into an animal, even one as undesirable as a raccoon.
Next on my list was Zoe Howard herself. I regretted that my only recollection of her was not a pleasant one—out of control at her friend’s wedding. I thought of Linda’s scoop, but a young woman with a temper wasn’t necessarily a murderer. And though I’d never thrown anything at my students, I understood how a classroom full of high school students could stretch the limits of a teacher’s patience and equanimity. Especially those of a substitute teacher, always considered an easy target.
Skip had said Zoe and her deceased boyfriend had been seen or heard fighting. Well, if that were the inevitable prelude to murder, we were all in trouble.
I’d met only a few people who worked with Brad Goodman in the Rutledge Center. Ryan the security guard. Ed the painter. Stephanie the . . . what? I’d have to find out. None seemed to have murderous looks in their eyes. Nan Browne, whom I hadn’t seen in a while, came to mind also. But as far as I knew, a mother’s love and desire for her daughter’s success weren’t on anyone’s list of top five reasons for murder.
Except for that case years ago in Texas, I remembered, where a mother killed her daughter’s cheerleading competitor. Or was it the competitor’s mother whom she killed? And didn’t she hire a hit man to do it? Why did I care about the details of these gruesome stories? Nothing like that would ever happen in Lincoln Point, anyway.
I surprised myself by putting Brad Goodman, the unfortunate victim, last on the list. I hoped there were many family members and friends who put him first. I was sorry I knew so little about him—that he was an artist from Chicago with an ex-wife named Rhonda and a girlfriend named Zoe and, thanks to Maddie’s sleuthing, a prizewinner at art shows in Santa Fe. I felt my mourning of him was very abstract, the way I would mourn any victim of violent crime. If I were serious about trying to help June and Zoe, I’d have to make an effort to get to know the man Brad had been. Was he pushy, as June had said, to the point of making someone angry enough to kill him, or was he a random victim?
I asked myself what procedure detective Skip Gowen would advise to gather more intelligence. I heard him in my mind, telling me to distance myself from any involvement in his case, except to comfort June. No doubt about that. And as for doing his own job, he’d have to look at more evidence, more suspects than I had knowledge of. The police didn’t have the luxury of armchair detectives who limited their investigation to a few obvious participants in a victim’s life.
It wasn’t out of the question that one of my students, whom I blithely greeted as I’d walked through the workshop area, or a competitor in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had a grudge against Brad Goodman that was serious enough for murder. Neither was it impossible that the killer was a stranger to Brad, a robber or an escaped mental patient. The panoply of people in Brad’s life stretched at least from Chicago to Santa Fe to Lincoln Point. My notepaper wasn’t long enough, nor my brain keen enough, to include all these possibilities.
I decided that my list of names was useless. I scratched out the names and made a list of what I could do this week instead.
First, visit the Rutledge Center, scene of the crime. The fact was that I had legitimate reasons to revisit the building. I needed some ideas to finish off the debate room box. Though I wasn’t making an exact copy of the set, I wanted it to be complementary to the mural that would grace the foyer of city hall and the individual paintings.
I could certainly visit Zoe in jail and hear her story first-hand. Just as a concerned Lincoln Point citizen, of course.
I’d also find some mother-in-law-to-daughter-in-law time with Mary Lou this week so I could get her take as an almost insider to the Rutledge Center.
A busy couple of days coming up. I conveniently left Skip out of my plans. Every time he sneaked in, in my mind, I saw a look of disapproval on his face.
Thursday morning’s schedule called for Richard to drive Maddie to school and me to pick her up. Mary Lou had been picked up by a gallery colleague before anyone was up, thoughtfully leaving a fresh pot of coffee on the counter and our favorite mugs lined up.
“What are you going to do today, Grandma?” Maddie asked. I heard a wistful tone, as if anything I had planned—even a trip to the post office or the dry cleaners—would be more fun than what she had to look forward to at the Angelican Hills school in Palo Alto.
I put an extra cookie in her already bulging lunch bag. The latest family joke was that Mary Lou would prepare Maddie’s lunch the night before, with a healthy sandwich, fruit, carrot sticks, and celery. In the morning, I’d unzip the bag and add sugar-based treats. This morning I also tucked a little ceramic heart into the corner, to bring a smile to her face.
“I’m going to the library,” I said. “I need to review the new study guides for tutoring Mrs. Pino.”
She drained her juice glass. “That’s it?”
“I might add an item or two to the debate scene, if you don’t mind.”
“You can glue down the stage.”
“Okay, then, that’s it. I’ll pick you up at three and we’ll go for a snack,” I said.
Richard snapped his briefcase shut. “If you two weren’t both so skinny I’d have to put a stop to this daily heavy snacking routine. Ice cream twice a day is a little over the top.”
I heard a little good-natured envy in his voice. Richard wasn’t overweight, but he did have to watch his calories, to keep it that way.
“Not ice cream today, Dad. Mrs. Norman at the bookstore told me there’s a popcorn shop downtown, in that new row of stores in back of Springfield Boulevard. Grandma and I are going to try it out today.”
“A whole shop of popcorn? How many different kinds can you have?”
“Twenty-three,” Maddie said, shoving her lunch bag into one of the many compartments of her backpack. “Chocolate drizzle, cheddar cheese, cinnamon, caramel, strawberry, cherry, apple—”
“Okay, I get it,” said her father.
“. . . bubble gum, cookie dough . . .” Maddie laughed through several more flavors until her father tickled her speechless as we walked together out to the driveway.
Maddie buckled herself into the backseat of the family SUV. One sacrifice that Richard made to bond with his daughter was to abandon his two-seater sports car on days when he drove Maddie to school. She was down to only once a day with her request that she be able to ride in the front seat of any vehicle. While she technically met the requirements for California child seat belt standards, Maddie’s parents (and I) thought the mechanism in Richard’s car didn’t shield her properly.
“We have hot cars, meant for hot chicks,” Skip said once, inadvertently in front of Maddie. The comment brought a blush to Skip’s face, a smile to Mary Lou’s and Maddie’s, and a deep frown to Richard’s. I’d laughed out loud.
Maddie made one more attempt to interrogate me from the backseat as I leaned in to the SUV to kiss her good-bye. “Are you sure you’re just going to the library?”
“Where else would I go?”
Both she and her father gave me disbelieving looks.
As they pulled away, a miniature cloud of guilt settled over me. Why hadn’t I told them my plans? Maybe because I felt I was the one who was going to have the most fun today. And they seemed to know it.
Chapter 8
So that I couldn’t be called a liar, I spent about ten minutes on the room box, adding a few small rocks to the sandpaper “gravel” in the debate scene, and gluing down the stage, as promised. I knew Maddie would enjoy making posters and littering the ground with miniature trash, so I resisted those touches. Maddie would be delighted to do the research to see just what kind of trash they had in 1858 (a better topic than looking up
obituaries of murder victims). I told her I was fairly sure it was too early for cigarette butts or metal soda cans.
As I dressed for my trip downtown I felt alternately like a spy, an undercover cop, and a sneak. When did I become less than honest with my family? When they started making it difficult for me to help a friend, I answered myself. I had to see Mary Lou soon, to bolster my resolve.
I chose neutral colors, plentiful in my wardrobe, for my outing—casual brown slacks, a gold-toned shell, and a long brown coat sweater. I felt ready for visits to a television studio and a jail. I hoped I didn’t forget to stop at the library for the only errand I’d owned up to.
My first stop was Rutledge Center where I arrived around nine o’clock. Mary Lou was right; there was no sign of crime-scene tape, and in fact there was normal activity at all the doors, mostly older people going into classrooms. I had a longing to take a class myself and made a note to pick up a catalog.
It made sense that the debate stage sets were being built and painted in the warehouse part of the complex, where I’d been yesterday afternoon, then would be transported somehow to the civic center auditorium. In times gone by the debate reenactment had been held outdoors, as most of the originals were, but one February rain in Lincoln Point destroyed that tradition and it had been held indoors for the last several years.
I knew it was unlikely that the Channel 29 studio itself was being used as a workroom. If my only purpose was to see the set, therefore, I had no reason to go into the east side studio entrance, where the crime-scene tape had been. But the Rutledge Center was a complicated setup, with its various walkways and interconnected parking lots, so it wasn’t surprising that I got lost and ended up entering the building on the east side. (A big wink, wink here.)
I was surprised (no wink here) that the door from the parking lot led right into a small waiting room for the television studio. It was empty this morning, except for its furnishings—a few mismatched chairs, a television set that was old even by my standards, and a rickety metal wagon with a coffeepot and condiments.
Malice in Miniature Page 8
