Malice in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  “Do you think Rhonda could have posed as Zoe and deliberately got herself on the security tape?” I asked Skip.

  “She’d have to know that the paintings were right there where the camera would pick her up,” Mary Lou said.

  “She could have figured that out and moved the paintings,” I suggested.

  “Wouldn’t she be flattered that she was the one Brad painted? If it was a good rendition, that is,” Mary Lou asked.

  Mary Lou had pulled a sketchbook from her own large canvas purse-tote and was multitasking. As we talked she worked with a piece of charcoal. I sensed a masterpiece in the making. She’d done a few caricatures of people in the waiting room across the narrow hall from us. She’d picked out the most prominent feature of each and captured them in an identifiable, whimsical way—a man with a bulbous nose who was wheezing; a little girl half asleep sucking her thumb; a man with heavy stubble and a head bandage. (Oops. Blood. I turned away.)

  “If Rhonda recognized that Brad had painted her likeness, all the better for framing Zoe,” I said.

  We both looked at Skip, as if finally remembering who was the true investigator in the room.

  “Don’t mind me. But there is the unique jacket,” he said.

  “Rhonda seems to have unlimited resources,” I said. “How difficult would it be to make a crude copy of a black jacket with rhinestones?”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “I take it you didn’t find a tissue paper jacket in Rhonda’s room?”

  “Ha. Wouldn’t that have been nice?”

  Mary Lou began a sketch of a jacket with a large Z on the back. I wondered if she’d ever considered a career as a police sketch artist.

  “Can you take another look at the tape? Or I could look at it,” I suggested.

  I got another I’m-annoyed look. “We can handle it, thanks.”

  “I just meant, I know fabric and crafts and all. And that’s what we’re talking about. Putting rhinestones, or something that looks like rhinestones on fabric.”

  “It’s just an analog videotape from an old VCR. It’s not digital and it’s not good quality. I don’t think you’re going to be able to tell whether the stones were stitched or glued for example. It’s just not that good a picture.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Just let her look and save us all some grief,” Mary Lou said, wielding her charcoal now on small strokes to represent stitching on a leather jacket.

  I gave my daughter-in-law a smile, but heard no promises from my nephew.

  “Who do you think attacked Rhonda?” I asked. I’d come back to the tape viewing later, perhaps with a plate of cookies in hand.

  “Who do you think attacked her?” Skip asked.

  “Zoe” was out before I could pull myself together mentally.

  “But Mom doesn’t have any reason for that except that the attack occurred right after Zoe got released on bail,” Mary Lou said. Her tone was neutral; I couldn’t tell if she was supporting my rationale or not.

  “Zoe has already been picked up, questioned, and let go,” Skip said. I got the call about a half hour ago. Evidently they disturbed her bubble bath and she screamed at the guys since she hadn’t had a bath for x number of days.”

  I hoped when all this was over, Zoe would schedule anger-management classes for herself. She should at least learn to control her temper when dealing with the police.

  “Her alibi?”

  “Zoe has an alibi to cover every minute of the time between her release and the attack on Rhonda.” In a manner reminiscent of my friend Linda, Skip paused for dramatic effect. “She TM’d someone to pick her up from the station and was with that person until just before the knock on her bathroom door.” I raised my eyebrows. “So to speak,” Skip said.

  “And the person . . .” But I took one look at his face and I knew who had given Zoe another airtight alibi. “June,” I said.

  His nod was slow, his expression sad.

  I patted his hand and wished I had some cookies in my enormous tote.

  The hospital cafeteria brought up more bad memories. Not only of bad coffee and ugly yellow walls, but of long nights with a book in front of me. I remembered having had to read the same page over and over because my concentration and energy, both mental and physical, were so low.

  Tonight at least there was some good news as Skip and Mary Lou and I sat at a small round table, its top in a faux wood-grain design.

  “If she’s able to alibi Zoe, June’s back in town, right?”

  “Yeah, but I only know that from word of mouth from the guys who talked to Zoe.”

  “You haven’t seen June or heard from her?”

  Another slow nod.

  I was stuck for something comforting to say. The sound of Mary Lou’s cell phone broke the silence.

  “It’s Maddie,” she said, reading the caller ID. “She hasn’t put her new cell phone down since she got it.” She clicked her phone on. “Hi, sweetie. Are you having fun?” A brief pause, then, “No? How come?”

  We all knew how come. Because she was missing the action.

  “We’re just doing an errand,” Mary Lou said into the phone. She rolled her eyes at us. Neither Skip nor I envied her task. “Why don’t you call Devyn?” Pause. “I know I said not too many calls to L.A., but this is Sunday, and you have unlimited minutes.” Pause. “Bye, sweetie. Put your dad on, okay?”

  Less than a minute later, my cell phone rang. Maddie, of course. “Call me back, Grandma, so I can get a call,” she said. “Then I won’t call again. I promise, I promise.”

  I obliged my granddaughter with a call and then turned back to Mary Lou and Skip.

  We were the only people in the hospital cafeteria who were laughing.

  Chapter 20

  Back in the ER waiting room, Rhonda’s doctor reported that she wouldn’t be awake before morning.

  How many times had I heard that message from Ken’s doctors?

  “Go home and get some rest,” they’d say, as if that were even remotely possible. But that had been a long time ago, more than two years, and I’d had many things to be grateful for since then. Once again, I implemented my plan to cut off my internal whining as soon as I could, each time accomplishing it a little more quickly than the last.

  At about seven o’clock, Mary Lou, Skip, and I walked toward the exit, stepping on the large mat in front of the ER doors. The automatic glass doors opened for us and for the two people wanting to enter the ER from outdoors. We all stopped—the three of us, and the two newcomers, June Chinn and Zoe Howard.

  June hugged each one of us in turn. She took a long time with Skip, causing the automatic doors to stay open and bringing complaints from the volunteer ladies at the information desk when the chilly February wind coursed through the hallway.

  Zoe stood back, a slight smile on her pale face. I wanted to adopt her for a week and feed her right. Unless she was Rhonda’s attacker, that is, and/or Brad Goodman’s killer.

  We backed up and commandeered the waiting area outside the ER again. (In fact, a woman and a teenager yielded to the mob front we presented and abandoned their paisley seats.) Mary Lou called Richard back and told him we’d be another little while.

  Without our asking, Zoe volunteered her story. “I know it looks bad for me, but I did not attack Rhonda. I wouldn’t have the strength, for one thing, and I wouldn’t have known where to find her, for another.”

  I noticed that the observations “I wouldn’t want to attack her” and “I’d have no reason to attack her” were not on Zoe’s list of facts. I chalked that up to honesty.

  June raised her right hand, as if she were under oath. “I promise you I am not lying when I say that I picked Zoe up at the jail and took her to her home, where I stayed until well after Rhonda was attacked.”

  One interpretation of June’s grammar was that they had a hotline to Rhonda’s attacker (“Call me when the attack is over,” June might have said) but I knew it was just June’s inadvertent obfus
cation that made it seem that way.

  The automatic doors opened and closed many times while we sat there. I saw enough crutches, slings, wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, and head bandages and heard enough wheezing, coughing, moaning, and sneezing to last awhile. But one pair of visitors caught my eye.

  Richard and Maddie came through the doors. More exactly, Maddie skipped through and Richard walked in with his hands in surrender.

  Maddie hugged me, then her mother, June, and Skip. She was smiling so broadly, she could hardly speak.

  “Hi, everybody,” she said.

  “How in the world did you know we were here?” I asked.

  Mary Lou snapped her fingers before anyone in her family could answer. “She heard the hospital noises in the background.”

  “That’s right,” Richard said. “Thanks to me, she recognizes even a muffled paging system or a code blue.”

  “What a detective!” Skip said, knowing what would make her blush.

  “All she had to do was convince me to drive us here,” Richard said.

  Mary Lou grabbed her daughter around the waist and pulled her onto her lap. “Lord, I don’t know what we’re going to do when you’re old enough to drive.”

  I shuddered at the thought.

  Maddie reached around to her backpack. She extracted what looked like a crude photo album from one of the zipper pockets and walked up to Zoe. Nobody had thought of introducing them, but Maddie took matters into her own hands.

  “You must be Zoe,” she said. “I saw your picture in the paper. I’m sorry about your boyfriend.”

  “Thank you,” Zoe said. The trace of awkwardness in her manner told me she didn’t have much to do with children.

  “I got some pictures of him off the Internet and made up a book in case I met you sometime. Dad said you were here, too, so I brought it for you,” she said, handing over the album.

  Zoe took the book, made of 8½-by-11 sheets of photo paper. Maddie had punched holes along one side of the sheaf and threaded ribbon (a selection I recognized from a roll of lavender with specks of gold that I kept in my ribbon drawer) through the holes to form a binding.

  Crafts by Maddie. Not inspired by or forced on her by her grandmother. My heart swelled.

  Zoe leafed through the photos, clearly touched by the gesture. We all strained to see. Some were headshots of Brad, others group photos obviously taken from newspaper articles or trade magazines.

  Now I could see what Maddie could produce when she had proper tools to work with.

  I thought of all the times when she’d visited me and complained about my computer, which was a good three generations behind the state of the art. She was now using her own up-to-date system—with an enormous number of bits or bytes, a scanner, color printer, and a wide variety of papers—destined to reside eventually in her new room in Palo Alto.

  Richard had also arranged for high-speed Internet access to be delivered (so to speak) to my house for six months.

  “If you don’t like it after that time, you can just cancel and go back to dial-up,” he’d told me. He’d sounded as if I’d be turning in my Saturn Ion for a horse and buggy if I chose that option. In fact, I’d gotten used to the fast response and planned to keep up the subscription.

  “When did you do this, sweetheart?” Mary Lou asked Maddie, flipping through the pages of photos and clippings.

  “During the week, while you guys were, you know, doing errands.” Her emphasis on the last word was not unexpected.

  “This is really wonderful,” Zoe said, her eyes tearing up.

  Everyone present echoed the sentiment. We all held out our hands for a turn at looking at the album closely.

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Maddie said.

  Zoe pulled her into a hug.

  If you’ve never dealt with children, I thought, Maddie was a good one to start with.

  The conversation broke into twos and threes. Maddie and June huddled for a while. I trusted June to explain to her little friend as well as she could why she’d left us without a word. Skip and Zoe had a chat that involved many hand gestures. Skip had made it clear that he was off duty, or as off duty as a cop can be. As long as they’re not hitting each other, I mused.

  Mary Lou, Richard, and I decided we might as well take the party home and have some real food.

  I clapped my hands, as I’d done in classrooms for more than two decades.

  “Is anyone hungry?” I asked.

  I never would have predicted the dinner scene at my home on Sunday evening. By eight o’clock, my house was full of people seated around the living room and dining room, plates of food on their laps. There were so many things upside down about the picture. First, that I’d served a buffet of leftovers to “company”; second, that the plates were paper; and third, that the guests included a murder suspect.

  Of the cast members of the week, only Linda was missing. I was grateful, lest we get into a discussion of pineapples versus grapefruits again.

  Richard and Skip were working on a smorgasbord of pot roast and side dishes; Mary Lou and June found enough Chinese take-out to satisfy them; Maddie, visibly delighted to be back in the middle of things, had poured herself a large glass of milk, the better to hide her microwaved pizza.

  Zoe had made herself a salad of butter lettuce, raw vegetables, croutons, and grated Parmesan cheese. “I need to ease into eating real food,” she said. “This is my first decent meal in a week.”

  “I’m glad I can accommodate you from my meager pickings,” I said, helping myself to pizza, the least popular choice among those over eleven years old.

  Light talk of the weather (more rain in store, but hopefully not on debate night) and guesses about who would be this year’s principal characters on Tuesday night (not Ryan, I was willing to bet, after I’d called his bluff and ruined his karma) lasted longer than I thought it would.

  I knew once everyone had taken in enough food to quell their hunger, we’d have to get down to a more serious discussion. One of the guests, after all, had been charged with murdering her boyfriend. And another had disappeared for several days without telling her boyfriend. (The rest of us lived normal, boring lives, except for the occasional feeling of being stalked.)

  Eventually, Zoe’s voice rose above the chatter, as she cornered Skip. I doubted she meant to command the attention of the whole room.

  “I don’t know who would want to kill him. I don’t know why you think I did,” she said. “I know people who don’t like me are bringing up all kinds of things. Like how I got fired from the school district. But I did not throw that eraser at a student. I threw it against the blackboard. In the opposite direction of the class, as a matter of fact. I had to get their attention somehow. Kids feel like substitute teachers are fair game for whatever bad behavior they want to indulge in.”

  I had no argument with that statement. And it wasn’t hard to imagine that Jason might have been exaggerating. Skip gave Zoe a muffled reply then got up to refill drink glasses. I figured he’d worked out any department logistics about being in my home with a murder suspect.

  I picked at my pizza (cheese topping only, since it had been ordered originally for Maddie on Chinese take-out night). It seemed ironic to me that with all her attempts at deception, Zoe looked and sounded more innocent to me each time I saw her.

  I could hardly wait to get back to the hospital to talk to Rhonda. I was sure that the LPPD could hardly wait, also, to hear my opinion of each woman as a potential killer.

  For the next hour, my house became the site of a group therapy session, or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, with all the outpourings, bonding, apologizing, explaining, and promises for the future.

  June met me in the kitchen at one point. She put her arm around my shoulder. “I know I shouldn’t have split like that, Gerry, but I was just so frantic.”

  “We missed you,” I said.

  “Same here, for sure. Skip has been so, so understanding, I can’t believe it.”

 
; “I’m glad to hear it. Did you have a good talk in the car on the way over here?”

  “Very good.” She let out a long, pleasant sigh. “I’m very lucky he didn’t blow me off. I should never have treated him that way.”

  “As long as you learned something.”

  “I did. And not just about me and Skip. I found out some things about Rhonda and Brad that I guess I really needed to hear.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s almost a cliché, and Zoe didn’t know anything about it. Rhonda put Brad through school, and when he started to make it in the art world, he also made it with a few younger artists, if you know what I mean.”

  “He cheated on her?”

  June picked up a dishcloth and dried the few serving bowls I’d used for the buffet. “Uh-huh. And that was the opinion of his friends. I can hardly repeat what others who didn’t like Brad said about him. I went to Chicago trying to find Rhonda and some proof that she was nuts enough to have killed Brad and I came away feeling a little sorry for her. And Zoe wasn’t exactly an angel in all this. She pulled some tricks to discredit Rhonda at the real estate office where she worked.”

  “What you found out gives Rhonda even more motive, though, doesn’t it?” I posed this question to myself as much as to June.

  “I guess. Not that Brad deserved to be murdered. I don’t mean that,” June said. “I just feel bad for Rhonda now.”

  “I do, too,” Zoe said, coming up behind with a load of paper plates and napkins. “And I feel really stupid myself, not knowing all this about my supposedly wonderful, faithful boyfriend.”

  I wondered if Zoe, though she wasn’t younger than Brad, had been one of his liaisons during his marriage to Rhonda. It didn’t seem appropriate to ask.

  “Well, I’m just glad it all worked out that June is back, and just in time to post your bail, Zoe. Let’s just hope now that—”