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 min
i 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 playing 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.
The simple version might involve kickbacks. I played it out: David uses his influence on the hotel’s executive committee to give contracts to Mellace, no matter what the competition. When Barry finds out, he blackmails David, the meeting goes wrong, and David is killed. Lots of holes in this plot, thanks to my ignorance of the ways contracts could be manipulated.
After this morning’s sighting at Scrap’s, I couldn’t rule out a coconspiracy between Barry and Cheryl. So they could take over Mellace Construction? I wondered if Maddie could use Google to find out what the insurance policy on the company looked like. If only she were an adult and I didn’t have to feel so guilty about these thoughts.
I’d checked out Barry’s marital status in Rosie’s updated yearbook-he was a bachelor. It crossed my mind that he himself might have wanted to connect with Rosie and was too shy, so he used David’s name as an intermediary.
I regretted that I had no brilliant suggestion as to who might be a good choice to take on the movie role of Barry Cannon.
It was disheartening to think that my students of thirty years ago seemed stuck in high school, in terms of the dynamics of relationships.
The logistics of David’s murder were still fuzzy in my mind. Did someone lug a cumbersome trophy to the murder scene, or did David carry it into the woods himself for some unknown reason? It was Barry who toted David’s trophy into the hotel gift shop. He was much more capable than Cheryl Mellace, for example, of transporting the heavy object and using it on David’s head. But why would he be walking around with something he intended to use as a murder weapon?
I’d meant to ask Skip about David’s estranged wife and son. Didn’t investigators always focus on immediate family first? It was possible that either David’s wife or his son was in custody now. I hoped that if that were the case, my man inside the LPPD would certainly alert me and spare me a lot of trouble and anxiety.
I thought of the other one hundred or so alumni who had gathered for the weekend, and the myriad of friends, relatives, and business contacts-Larry Esterman, Rosie’s father, and the rest of the personnel of Callahan and Savage, for example-that David had accumulated over the last thirty years. Any one of them could have had a better motive than those on my personal suspect list.
The awful use of glue brought ugly images that I tried to shuck, but it was a clue that had to be accounted for and didn’t fit with any suspect other than my miniaturist friend.
Here again, I’d have to leave something for the LPPD to do to earn their large salaries.
Miller’s was old school from start to finish, the kind of mortuary I was used to seeing when I lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but not in sunny California where funeral homes were as likely as not to have skylights. The building was set back from a row of stores along Springfield Boulevard.
Stained-glass windows depicted pastoral scenes, and Gregorian chant from a hidden source greeted the guests as we took our places on Miller’s dark wood pews. Except for the absence of statuary and incense, the room could have passed for the interior of a Catholic church, like those I’d seen when Ken and I toured Italy.
I chose a seat near the back of the room, the better to survey who came and went. Especially Rosie. I flopped my large purse next to me, to save her a seat, though the room could easily have held twice as many as the hundred or so people I estimated to be present.
I admired the floral arrangements surrounding the lectern at the front and wished I�
�d thought of sending one myself. This was not the official funeral service, I remembered, and there was still time for me to contribute.
I’d picked up a flyer, tasteful, but clearly done in a hurry, with a recent photograph of David Bridges, with his birth and death dates, juxtaposed with the original yearbook photograph and write-up for him: “Our own strong, handsome BMOC, sure to succeed in life as he has on Abraham Lincoln High’s football field.”
A feeling of sadness overtook me, perhaps because of the simple prose or the dejected faces of David’s peers all around me, or because it dawned on me that I hadn’t taken any time to grieve for a former student who died a violent death in my own hometown.
I’d been so busy trying to protect Rosie, first from the disdain of the living David and now from being named his killer, that I’d forgotten who was the real victim.
I hung my head, reflecting and feeling the loss.
***
During the forty-five-minute service, while I listened to eulogies and sang “Amazing Grace,” I scanned the crowd, looking for Rosie and the other, more worthy suspects.
I spotted the Mellaces, hand in hand a few rows in front of me. It was impossible to tell from their body language that they were anything but a devoted couple. I supposed that Walter and Cheryl might indeed have a happy marriage-on Friday night on the eleventh floor of the Duns Scotus, Cheryl and David might have been playing a friendly game of chess, and today on the sidewalk in front of Scrap’s, Cheryl and Barry might have been talking over old times.
How did Cheryl keep her men straight?
After eulogies from principal Frank Thayer, Coach Robbins, and Barry, we were all invited to share memories of David. Walter Mellace was first up, though he wasn’t even a classmate. He talked about how lucky some of us were to have known David thirty years ago, and how he wished he’d known him.
Murder In Miniature Page 15
