Mourning In Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  Awkwardly put, but on further thought, I realized Maddie wasn’t trying to get even with me for dumping her at a pool every chance I had since Friday; she wanted to be seen as helpful to all.

  The family that investigates together, stays together?

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” I said. “This is very useful.”

  I pulled out of the Rutledge Center at eight in the morning, after dropping Maddie off for day camp. She was excited about what she was learning, but vague about the details.

  “We’re making up games. You’d be bored,” she’d said.

  By which I guessed she meant I wouldn’t get it, as I’d demonstrated all month. I shuddered to think what she’d be able to pull off with even more computer knowledge.

  My cell phone rang, throwing me into confusion about how to access the call. I had a new Bluetooth contraption on my ear and could never remember the sequence of pushing buttons to answer a call.

  It had taken three tries to find a design that fit and I still couldn’t use it with the abandon I saw young people using it. The robot-like units on their ears seemed to survive stretching over the counter for their lattes or bending to pick up a dropped set of keys, whereas I could barely move my neck and still keep it on. But “hands free” was the California driving and calling law and I was nothing if not law-abiding.

  Most of the time.

  I was pleased to hear Henry Baker’s voice, though any voice would have spelled my success at using the new technology.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” he said.

  “Not at all. I’m downtown in my car.”

  “I was thinking—why don’t I pick you up and we can go to David’s service together?” Henry said. “I don’t have grandfather duty today and it seems silly for us to drive separately.”

  Which we’d been doing the last few decades, I thought. I liked the flexibility of having my own car, in case . . . well, in case something came up on The Case.

  “It’s a great idea, but I have some errands to do before and after,” I said. Errands. The term I used on Maddie. Maybe I should think of another term for adults.

  “Right,” Henry said, as if he didn’t believe me.

  “Otherwise, I’d love to,” I said. “Some other time.”

  He laughed. “Sure. Some other memorial service, okay?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  We hung up on cordial terms but I had the feeling I’d disappointed him. Too late I remembered that it was Henry who’d first mentioned that Rosie’s father was a subcontractor with Callahan and Savage. Maybe he knew more. I was sorry I’d missed an opportunity to talk to him about that.

  And maybe other opportunities as well, but I was busy enough as it was.

  On the way home I did the one legitimate errand I had for today and drove through the Lincoln Point Library book drop station. I’d checked out several history and English books to review for Lourdes’s use and I wanted to return the ones I thought were inappropriate for her current level. It gave me some measure of satisfaction that I was doing my unquestionable duty for my GED student, as opposed to the wild physical and mental meanderings I’d been involved in, in an effort to free my friend from suspicion of murder.

  I always craned my neck when I passed Sadie’s Ice Cream Shop. Even at this hour of the morning, milk shakes beckoned. Milk was a breakfast food, was it not? Sadie’s looked dark, however, as on most days before ten o’clock. I considered stopping and looking in the window. I knew from previous experiences of these off-hours cravings that, if she or Colleen were working in the back, there was a chance I could rouse them and gain admittance.

  I slowed down and pulled over to the right on Springfield Boulevard, across from Sadie’s, intending to cross the street and scan the shop for movement. This put me almost directly in front of Scrap’s, Lincoln Point’s worst fast-food restaurant. (You’d think if you were going to serve inferior foodstuff, you wouldn’t make it so obvious by the name of your establishment.)

  Scrap’s opened very early to serve the breakfast-bacon-to-go crowd, a few of whom were exiting now with white paper sacks. I could almost see the grease leaking through from where I sat in my car, exchanging glasses and gathering my purse.

  I was about to exit when a family group caught my eye. On closer inspection—not a family group, but Cheryl Mellace, Barry Cannon, and a little boy about four years old. I pulled my leg back in and snapped the visor down in front of my face.

  Was the woman who could buy and sell the entire town of Lincoln Point a closet junk-food junkie? Neither Cheryl nor Barry had a to-go sack, so they must have eaten inside the restaurant. Who could guess that Scrap’s was the in place for celebrity sighting?

  The group stopped only a few yards from my car. Cheryl and Barry, her husband’s CFO, were engaged in animated conversation, but not arguing, as far as I could make out. Cheryl held fast to the little boy’s hand. I’d read that her children were grown and figured this to be a grandson.

  I thought of rolling down my window but didn’t want to make the slightest noise, lest they see me. My plan for that contingency was to wave and pretend I’d just arrived. I was torn between clandestine observation and full-fledged interaction. Why wait until the service, almost two hours away?

  Before I could make my choice, the group broke up. Cheryl had picked up the little boy and walked north toward Hanks Road. The toddler nuzzled his face on Cheryl’s shoulder, as Maddie used to do. Cheryl patted his back and nuzzled him back. It was the first soft gesture I’d seen from her and I had to rethink my view of her as cold and witch-like. Grandmothers could dump their grandchildren into pools, I knew, but they couldn’t be killers, could they?

  Barry came toward me. I turned my back to the sidewalk, using my purse to shield my profile. Barry walked quickly, looking straight ahead.

  The moment was gone to speak to either Cheryl or Barry. My reaction time had been too slow. If I’d already had a milk shake, I might have done better.

  I decided against Sadie’s also, however, and headed for home.

  I thought back to the muted conversation between Cheryl and Barry. I hadn’t seen any sign of mourning or grief. Not that outward manifestations were necessary, and not that life had to stand still when a friend died. But having seen Cheryl with David on Friday night, I expected less normalcy in her behavior just two days after his death.

  I replayed the scene. Had there been any clue of a romantic connection between the two? I didn’t think so. Surely, it would be too soon for Cheryl to replace David in that way. But maybe she had the ability to bounce back emotionally the way she bounced on the football field with her pom-poms.

  Alas, none of this was my area of expertise.

  When I returned home, I found Skip at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee, toast, and a half dozen of my ginger cookies.

  “Why do you bother with the toast?” I asked him.

  “Appearances.”

  I poured a cup of coffee for myself and joined him.

  “I thought we could chat before the service,” he said. “It would help a lot if you could give me your version of the relationship between Rosie and Bridges.”

  I felt a conundrum coming on, like the hint of a headache when I didn’t get enough sleep or when I didn’t switch from coffee to tea early enough in the day. If I told Skip of the obsessive nature of Rosie’s attachment, real or fictional, to David Bridges, and her deep-seated anger after his rebuke, it would make matters worse for her.

  I related the story in as neutral terms as possible, making it sound like high school-style unrequited love. “We’ve all been there,” I ended, as if I myself had once staked all my happiness on the off chance that someone I hadn’t talked to in thirty years was now longing for me.

  “Hmm,” was all Skip said. Maybe, unlike me, he had been there.

  “Can we review the other suspects?” I asked. “For example, have you looked into the man named Ben whom I told you about—David’s employee?”

 
; “The SFPD might have picked up on that.”

  “Might have? Don’t you share?”

  “They wouldn’t necessarily share that. They interviewed a lot of the reunion class and even other guests who were at the hotel that night. I’m assuming if the fight was that public, one of them would have remembered, too.”

  “They didn’t interview me or Rosie, so on that alone we know they’re not being thorough.”

  Skip shrugged and left the table. He pulled a plastic storage bag from a box in my kitchen drawer and filled it with ginger cookies. From the number he took, I guessed he was planning on a long, tough day.

  I was thrown back in time to the young boy, newly fatherless, who visited Ken and me (mostly Ken) more and more often, falling asleep on our guest bed or on the floor in his cousin Richard’s room, treating our home as his. They were difficult days for all of us, especially for Beverly, who drew comfort from her brother’s near adoption of her son.

  I was almost surprised to hear the voice of the grown-up Skip as he addressed me now, back at the table, notebook and pen ready.

  “This is what happens sometimes when there’s questionable jurisdiction at the beginning. I hate to say it, but now and then things fall through the cracks.”

  It bothered me that a murderer might go free because of a breach of continuity in an investigation from one city to another less than an hour away. It didn’t seem a very thorough way to do police business, but I resisted complaining to Skip. I knew his job was hard enough.

  “And when it’s early in a case, no one knows exactly what will matter in the end and we try to cover all bases,” Skip continued, while I pondered my next move.

  “Can’t you go to San Francisco and find out more about this maintenance supervisor, Ben Dobson? It’s peculiar that one minute he’s fighting with the victim, and the next he quits on the spot.” I thought back to my own inability to get anything out of Mike the electrician and only the vaguest mention of Ben’s temperament from Enrico the plumber.

  “How do you know he was a supervisor?”

  “My toilet got stopped up,” I said.

  Skip gave me a confused look, then laughed as if I’d told a joke. I let it go at that.

  It was time I came through for my nephew, and did something that would benefit Rosie also. The sooner Rosie showed up for the police, the sooner we could get to the bottom of the case and clear her. It wasn’t as if Rosie were doing any good out there, now technically in the wind, since neither Linda nor I knew where she was holing up. She wasn’t in any shape to investigate on her own, but maybe the police would get a tidbit from her that would help.

  I decided to come clean (almost) about my recent brushes with assault, in case there might be a useful tidbit buried in the incidents.

  Skip jotted notes and kept any responses to himself while I talked. I described Walter Mellace’s stopping me aggressively in the hallway. I was a little vague on the timeline and on what you might call . . . ahem . . . trespassing, but I had the feeling Skip was able to put it all together nicely. He remained surprisingly restrained.

  “Doesn’t that sound like you should look at those RFPs and why Callahan and Savage gets the short end all the time?” I asked.

  Skip nodded. “I already put someone on that. It turns out that Bridges did have decision-making power on that stuff. He was only one vote on the hotel’s executive committee, but when it came to anything related to maintenance or upgrades, they essentially followed his recommendation.”

  “There’s more.” I braced myself for the purse-snatching story. “But it’s probably completely unrelated,” I began. By the time I got to the act of theft itself, however, Skip had dropped his pen and his eyes had widened. I feared he was going to call an ambulance.

  “Did you report this?” he asked. Why not to me? was in his voice.

  “Yes, yes, and I didn’t lose anything.” I thought of Big Blue with his crooked nose and gentle manner. “They took all the information, and I got my purse back, but no one expects the thief to be caught. I’m telling you this because I think it’s possible that he was also looking for something I might have found in David’s room.”

  Skip relaxed, realizing I guessed, that since I had no visible bruises, there was nothing to worry about. I waited while he doodled and wrote a few notes.

  Our session would have to come to a close soon. David’s memorial was at ten at Miller’s Mortuary, near the main commercial district of Lincoln Point.

  I wanted to leave Skip with a final thought before he considered handcuffs, for Rosie or for me. Fortunately he never pushed me on how, when, or why I got into David’s room.

  “Rosie isn’t capable of murder,” I said, my final word as I got up to clear the table.

  Skip looked at me, a mixture of sadness and frustration in his expression. “Have a seat, Aunt Gerry.”

  I sat. “What?” I knew that nothing good could come from his tone. I sipped my coffee.

  “I didn’t want to be too graphic before, but you ought to know this.” He took a breath. “About what the killer did to David’s body.”

  “Do I need to hear this?”

  “I think so. David Bridges’s lips were glued shut, Aunt Gerry. That’s the glue we matched to the pieces in the mini box.”

  It took a few seconds to register, then I grasped the edge of the table and hung my head. My breath felt heavy in my lungs. I fought down an acidy taste in my mouth. The last mouthful of coffee now seemed like a big mistake.

  I had a flashback to my conversation with Linda—I’d interrupted her when she tried to describe what an indiscreet EMT friend had told her.

  I pictured David’s lips . . .

  “Excuse me,” I said and headed for my bathroom.

  Who could do such a thing? I didn’t for a minute think that a miniaturist could use her craft in such a horrible way. Certainly not one who came to my house once a week for an uplifting evening of shared creativity. Although in Skip’s mind, the awful detail was further proof of Rosie’s guilt, to me it was the clearest sign that Rosie had been framed.

  Miniaturists treasured their craft, the fruits of their labor, even their glue. I tried to hold fast to this belief even as the awful image flooded my mind—a vandalized room box with hateful words, destroyed property, and a tiny bottle of poison.

  Chapter 14

  To some it might seem disrespectful, but I planned to take full advantage of the memorial service for David Bridges, using it as a tool to make progress in finding his killer. From what I’d heard from Skip, I wasn’t convinced the police would do anything but settle on Rosie.

  My views might have come from too much exposure to television dramas (though real-life drama seemed to have taken over my time lately), but I believed that David’s killer would show up for this service. Moreover, if he was from out of town, this might be my last chance to have a close look and a talk with him. Or her.

  As I got ready for my visit to Miller’s Mortuary, deciding to wear a jacket in spite of the heat, I made a mental list of whom to look for and try to console.

  In my mind, the Mellaces were the prime suspects. Walter’s motivation could be simply that he’d found out about David and his wife, who seemed to have enjoyed at least one exclusive party together, if not a longer-term arrangement.

  Cheryl’s motivation, according to self-appointed Detective Gerry Porter, could be that she became uncontrollably upset when David rejected her offer to leave her husband for him. I worked out a standard scenario in Movies of the Week: now that her children are grown and out on their own, Cheryl can be with David as she’s wanted since high school. But David never intended to be committed to her in that way; he was never serious about her.

  I wasn’t sure how Cheryl managed to carry the trophy from San Francisco to Lincoln Point or lift it high enough to kill David, but I had to leave something for the police to figure out.

  I found myself casting the movie version of the triangle, with perhaps the petite Holly Hunter pl
aying Cheryl.

  David’s fictional rejection of Cheryl loomed larger and was more of an issue in my mind than his real rejection of Rosie, which I’d seen with my own eyes. My mind was a marvel. “Anyone but Rosie Norman” was its theme.

  I wished I were confident in my ability to recognize Ben Dobson without his gray jumpsuit. I had no idea where he lived but guessed it was San Francisco. Maybe there would be a revealing decal on his car: A monk in a habit and the words Duns Scotus Supervisor. It was possible that Ben wouldn’t come to this unofficial service, however, in which case I’d have to nab him at the funeral on Saturday at St. Bridget’s, assuming he’d go to that. I hoped the case would be solved by then. I had a life to get back to. Sort of.

  Barry Cannon, sure to be in attendance, as class president, also had to answer for his elaborate fraud, sending gifts in David’s name. I realized I was leaping from a box of chocolates (if Samantha’s ID was correct) to a shower of jewelry and flowers over the past weeks, but it seemed reasonable. If nothing else, the ID by Samantha, the lovely gift shop clerk, gave credibility to Rosie’s claims that she received a series of presents. It told me that at the very least Rosie hadn’t sent the chocolates to herself—ashamed as I was to acknowledge that I’d given that idea some thought, as I was sure some members of the crafters group had.

  I tried to work through what Barry’s scenario could have been. To lead Rosie into thinking David was wooing her, so as to get her mad enough to kill him? Why? Because Barry wanted David dead but didn’t want to do it himself? Rosie as hit woman. The idea sounded silly even to me, its originator.

  Barry was the CFO for Mellace, who did business with the Duns Scotus, and therefore with David. If only I knew more about white-collar crime, I might be able to put together a business-related motive for Barry.