Mourning In Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  “You got me involved,” I’d say, reminding him of his phone call alerting me to David’s murder and requesting my help in locating Rosie. Maybe that was too junior high, reminiscent of many such “he started it” exchanges between Skip and my son, Richard.

  “I’d like to help” wouldn’t work, since Skip consistently reminded me that the Lincoln Point Police Department had enough sworn officers to take care of business.

  “Excuse me?” he’d say. “Do you have a badge?”

  “I’m your only aunt and you owe me” might do the trick, but I’d used it before.

  I realized I needed some new material.

  I always preferred dealing with female LPPD officers, not because of any sexist or feminist leanings, but because usually they were hot for (Maddie’s term; I still preferred the old-fashioned “sweet on”) Skip. This meant that they’d be especially accommodating and nice to me. It didn’t seem to matter that Skip and June, my next-door neighbor, were practically engaged. Maybe even one step closer this weekend since Skip had taken June to Seattle to meet his mother’s boyfriend’s family. Never mind that the weekend was cut off at the pass. His intentions spoke of commitment.

  Was every extended family this complicated to talk about?

  I was in luck. Lavana Rollins, an attractive member of the almost-thirty crowd, like Skip, was on duty at the front desk. After the hot-weather talk, I got to my point.

  “Too bad Skip had to cut his trip to Seattle short,” I said to Lavana.

  “Yeah, we got this big case, and so many people are on vacation in faraway places. Poor Skip was close enough to be called back.”

  “I just heard the announcement. It’s such a shame about David Bridges,” I said.

  “Too true. I didn’t know him, but I guess he was very popular around here during the football heyday at the high school.”

  The days Lincoln Point expected to get back with a new stadium. “I had David as a student a long time ago. I hope you’re making progress finding his killer.”

  “Ha. They don’t tell me anything. I’m just a uniform,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. I love my job. I get to carry the evidence.” Lavana’s laugh was hearty, befitting her substantial frame. “The strangest thing came in this morning, though. You’d have found it very interesting.”

  I didn’t have to fake my intense curiosity. “Oh?”

  “Hey, Rollins.” I heard a deep voice from behind the wide front counter where Lavana stood. “How about those files?”

  “Gotta go,” Lavana told me. “Skip should be here any minute. You can go on back and wait.”

  That was my hoped-for scenario: that I’d have a few minutes alone at Skip’s desk to reflect. Or to snoop, depending on what you wanted to call it. I did wonder about the evidence Lavana mentioned, but it would have been unseemly to act nosy.

  “Thanks, Lavana.” I gave her a grateful smile. “I know the way.”

  “You didn’t happen to bring any of those ginger cookies?” she whispered. Apparently if I did, she wasn’t planning on sharing.

  As a matter of fact, I had pulled a bag out of the cooler in my car, as an offering to Skip, but I was willing to use them to barter wherever necessary. I opened a small plastic container within the bag and invited her to help herself. It was a small price to pay for a few minutes alone in Skip’s cubicle.

  Food as sycophantism. Another time-honored Porter tradition.

  I sat in Skip’s office, in the visitors’ chair, facing the cubicle opening and his bulletin board. I had a paperback of To Kill a Mockingbird open on my lap, for effect. I really had wanted to reread the classic, but today it served double duty as a cover.

  The beige corkboard was cluttered with business and personal items, including a wonderful photo of a very young Maddie, her father, and me. I remembered the long-ago trip to Pier 39, one of San Francisco’s many fun places for kids. If Skip gave me any grief today, I’d remind him of his loving family.

  Maddie looked happy in the photo, next to a life-size yellow cartoon animal of no particular delineation. Unlike now, I mused, when she was probably fuming as much as an eleven-year-old could fume. Maddie was in a prolonged Nancy Drew phase and hated to be left out of any investigative tasks. She was at least in an environment she might like, this time, with someone her own age and a wonderful (I guessed) workshop to browse in.

  I saw nothing useful on Skip’s bulletin board. I’d been hoping for a to-do list. Clear Rosie Norman could have been an item. Then, Arrest John Doe. I started a mental list of who John Doe could be. No one had asked my opinion, but I thought the police should be looking into David’s ex-wife, his estranged son, and especially the Duns Scotus employee we all saw him arguing with last night.

  I moved my chair slightly, to have a better angle on the desk. Lavana had said Skip would be back “any minute” and I didn’t want to be caught out-and-out snooping. I scanned the clutter for a file labeled Aunt Gerry’s Friend, Rosie. Or, simply, Norman.

  Nothing.

  Nothing big, that is. But there was something small. Under a few loose sheets of paper, I saw the edge of a hotel key card.

  Still keeping an eye on the cubicle opening, I flung my left arm out, felt around for the card, and pulled it out. A Duns Scotus key, like the one in my purse. This one had a slightly different likeness of the Franciscan metaphysician, but it was the Subtle Doctor himself, in his brown habit.

  The key cards to the hotel were imprinted with different reproductions of paintings of Duns Scotus; even keys to the same room had different images. I found the same policy at the last hotel I’d been in, in Monterey, where the cards bore a variety of pictures of the ocean. I didn’t see the point, except in terms of exposure to art. The bottom line was that there was no way to tell which key went with which room these days. No more large numerals etched on circles or flat metal keys. All for better security, which was on everyone’s mind.

  I didn’t know yet where David had been murdered, but wherever it was, all the sophisticated, increased security in the world hadn’t helped him.

  Whose key card was I holding? David’s? Rosie’s, therefore mine?

  It wasn’t a good sign if the Lincoln Point police went to all the trouble to go to San Francisco and enter our room. Skip had said they didn’t know where the murder had taken place. If David had been killed at the hotel, then the San Francisco police would handle it. Pangs of guilt accompanied my desire to have LPPD in charge of the case so I could keep track of it.

  I was betting on the key’s being for David’s room, probably found on his person. I wondered if it had been reprogrammed or if it would still work. Should I take it? It would certainly help if I needed to do some investigating myself. If Skip needed to get into a hotel room, I reasoned, he could just flash his badge.

  What would I do with it? I had a pretty good idea. Was it evidence? No, if it were evidence it would be in a marked bag. It was now LPPD property, however—hard to get around that. Unless it was Rosie’s key card, in which case, it was also mine.

  Before I could decide the level of misdemeanor I was willing to risk, I heard Skip. His tenor voice came closer and closer as he greeted his colleagues with a “Hey,” or a “Dude,” or a “What’s up?”

  I had no time to place the key card in the exact location I’d taken it from. It made sense, therefore, to slip it into my pocket. With the jumble of papers, folders, and notes on his desk, he wouldn’t miss it. Not right away at least. I could always sneak it back later.

  “Hey, Aunt Gerry, you’re late,” Skip said when he entered his cubicle. He looked at his watch. “I expected you over an hour ago, right after we hung up.”

  Very funny. “I had to take Maddie to lunch,” I said.

  “And you brought me . . . ?”

  I handed over the rest of the ginger cookies. I could have sworn he stared at the spot on his desk where the key card had been. I had to concentrate, swallowing hard, distracting myself from looking there myself. I remembered a thriller
I’d seen where the suspect revealed his guilt merely by looking at a spot on the wall where the bullet had penetrated, something he couldn’t have known unless he’d put it there. I held fast, but I was sure I saw out of the corner of my eye a red glow where once the key belonging to the LPPD had been.

  “I thought you might want to share more with me. About why you were looking for Rosie Norman?”

  He chewed slowly on a ginger cookie. “Mmm,” came out of his mouth instead of information. “Still the best, Aunt Gerry.” He picked up my paperback, which had fallen to the floor. “This is your snooping cover, right? I don’t see a bookmark.”

  My nephew was so annoying when he was right. “Skip? You called me, remember? I just want to know what in the world makes you think Rosie murdered David Bridges?”

  “Did I say that?” he asked.

  “Not in so many words. Do you deny that you think she might be involved?”

  “Not exactly.”

  My heart sank, my last miniature amount of hope flitting away. I clung to his qualified answer. He hadn’t given me an outright “no.” “Can you at least tell me where his body was found?”

  “A group of teenagers found him when they went to Joshua Speed Woods for some early morning necking. We don’t know if that was the actual scene of the crime, though the last word was yes, probably he was killed right there. The kids’ statement says that the trophy was next to the body. They picked it up to see whose it was. I have a feeling every one of them handled it, so we’re still sorting out whose fingerprints are recoverable.”

  Up to now, when I’d had occasion to pass by or talk about the wooded area to the west of the main part of town, I imagined the look on the face of one of Lincoln’s closest friends, Kentuckian Joshua Speed—if he could have known that his namesake woods were used mostly as a lovers’ lane. Now, for a long time, I’d remember it as a murder scene.

  The worst realization at the moment, however, was that Rosie lived on Joshua Speed Lane, which bordered the woods.

  I felt the strangest regret that I hadn’t listened more closely to Rosie when she described her long-ago relationship to David. All the times she’d gone on and on at the crafts table, and most of us absorbed less than half of what she said, I guessed. She’d mentioned one “date gone bad” as I recalled. I didn’t care at the time, but now I wished I knew precisely how badly it had gone.

  Skip bent down to the floor on the side of his desk and picked up a brown paper bag. Too large for lunch. Big enough for evidence.

  I was on pins and needles as he reached into the bag. What he pulled out was one of the last things I would have guessed, right before “a flock of seagulls.”

  Skip took his time. Rosie’s locker room scene emerged from the bag, one tiny, gray locker at a time. I couldn’t blame Skip for playing out the drama.

  I didn’t remember so much red in the décor. I looked more closely. The scene had been trashed. I hate David had been written in red paint across three or four adjacent lockers. The tiny jersey with David’s old number thirty-six had been torn to shreds. There was “trash” everywhere, in the form of bits of cloth and paper and a deflated football.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “Can you identify the item?”

  I gulped. I felt as though I were in a witness box. Or on trial myself.

  “It’s Rosie’s,” I said. “I mean it looks like Rosie’s. What do you think it means?”

  “My question exactly.” He placed the room box on his desk. “Look carefully. It’s been dusted, as much as we could, considering where we found it, but you still shouldn’t touch it.”

  The most I could ever hope for from my nephew was that he would answer half the questions I asked. I didn’t push the issue, lest I inadvertently give away something that incriminated Rosie.

  I squinted at the ravaged scene. I reached into my tote for the magnifier I always carry and held it close. It took a great effort not to run my finger across the red paint. I grimaced as if it were real blood.

  I saw what had impressed Skip. The most striking addition to the scene was a bottle of poison. It seemed Rosie had taken a piece of white filter paper from the coffee system that every hotel room has these days and fashioned a small cylinder to resemble a bottle. She’d used the plastic packaging from a coffee pouch to shape a bottle top. Not too many people would have been able to identify this clever use of found objects, but it happened to be my specialty. The work had been done in a hurry (or in a state of torment) but was what my crafters group would have declared “cute.”

  Except for what was written on the bottle. Rosie—or someone else, I reminded myself—had drawn the shape of a label, with a skull and crossbones and the word poison.

  Lavana Rollins had been right when she called it a strange piece of evidence that I’d find “very interesting.”

  “Well?” Skip said. “What’s it supposed to be? Something other than a clue to her state of mind? And, by the way, there’s more potential evidence that I can’t tell you about right now.”

  I felt it necessary to explain the craft group’s Alasita project to Skip, hoping the context would work in Rosie’s favor. “Before the vandalism, it was like a prayer for a happy meeting between Rosie and David,” I said.

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  “You have?”

  “When June and I went to Mexico we saw a version of Alasita. They had parades and dancing and all, but the miniatures were nothing as fancy as this. They were more likely to do something rough or just buy a little key chain if they wanted a car or a house.” He rummaged around the back of his desk and extracted a wooden owl. “June got me this. To bring me wisdom.”

  “You said there was something else. More potential evidence? Not that this is evidence.”

  “Yeah, well, never mind that right now.”

  “But David wasn’t poisoned. Doesn’t that count?”

  “Gotta go, Aunt Gerry.”

  I managed a few more Q-and-As before he got serious about my leaving. The gentle pressure on my arm as he led me from his cubicle told me that it was time.

  If I ever needed an owl, it was now.

  I drove north on Springfield Boulevard toward my neighborhood, and it so happened, Henry’s also. Since this was the main street for markets and shops, there was medium-to-heavy traffic this Saturday afternoon. Not usually an impatient driver, right now I couldn’t wait to see how Maddie was faring.

  Skip had been as forthcoming as he was going to be. It was neither surprising nor unusual that he’d gotten more from me than I’d gotten from him. After all, he was highly trained in investigative and interviewing techniques. I didn’t know whether to be ashamed or proud of myself for getting away with the hotel key card.

  I’d given Skip a watered-down version of Rosie’s behavior of late, trying to make her out to be less a stalker than she was. It couldn’t hurt to act as a character witness to balance out her miniature crime scene. I told him the truth about my temporary roommate, that I’d seen her leave David’s doorway about ten thirty last night and then saw her again in her bed when I woke up this morning.

  “If you could tell me the time of David’s death . . . ?” I’d asked, to no avail.

  Skip had brushed off the fact that David had been beaten, not poisoned. That his body hadn’t been left in the old locker hallway, as might be indicated by Rosie’s little amended scene. That there must have been many other people from David’s current life with a better motive to kill him than one who hadn’t seen him in thirty years. (How about Ben, that unhappy employee in the jumpsuit, for example? Or the son he hadn’t seen in years.) That Rosie was one of the last people I’d expect to have the will or the strength to beat someone to death, especially a large man like David Bridges.

  I wondered where the locker scene had been found, where Rosie was now, and where she had been between ten thirty last night and seven o’clock this morning. I couldn’t be at all sure how long she’d been in bed when I woke up.
She might have been fully dressed under the covers, having sailed in only a moment before.

  I wished I knew where and when David was killed.

  I wished all I had to think about was what fun it would be to see Henry Baker’s woodworking.

  I barely had my car in Park when Maddie ran up to me. She and Taylor, trailing behind her, were soaking wet. I caught a glimpse of the backyard swimming pool and marveled at her hearing, or some other sense that told her I was approaching the house.

  “I’m sorry I skipped out like that, sweetheart,” I told Maddie, bracing myself for a wet hug and a barrage of whining.

  I got both.

  “I know what you were doing, Grandma.”

  I tickled her bare midriff, always an effective distraction, then addressed Taylor. “So, what have you two been up to?”

  Henry came out of the garage as the girls gave alternating reports of their hour and a half of fun. A little television, a little computer work, and more swimming.

  I allowed myself to enter the world of Henry’s workshop, physically and mentally, and forget the stress of the day. Thanks to Ken, I recognized a good-quality new band saw in the corner and an old table saw next to it.

  Henry showed us a rocking chair he had just finished, a beautiful cherrywood creation with the longest, most graceful rockers I’d ever seen.

  “It’s in the style of Sam Maloof,” he said, as if I might know who that was.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about life-size furniture,” I said. “Ken knew every style of architecture backward and forward and he taught me a lot, but he wasn’t interested when it came to interiors. And, as for me, I’ve always stuck to dollhouse-size furniture.”

  “I didn’t mean to name-drop. The Maloof style’s very well known in the circle of furniture designers. His work is in museums and in the White House.” Henry pointed to a photograph of Jimmy Carter in a woodworking shop. “He had a lot of fans.”