“Is that so?” I said, mostly to myself. “Can you show me that hit?” I asked Maddie, proud of my jargon.
“You mean ‘open that link’?” my sassy granddaughter responded.
“Whatever.”
The article, with no photo this time, was brief: Oliver Halbert was accused of offering a bribe to an insurance agent, to arrange for a larger settlement from the agent’s company. The case seemed to be about mold in his home. According to the story, he’d been trying to convince the agent to backdate his policy so that it would cover more of the damaged area.
How could that be? Wasn’t his latest crusade about bribery? Wasn’t it bribery that got him murdered, according to Susan?
I remembered something Skip had told me a while ago—that the people who speak out the most loudly against a particular crime are often guilty of that crime themselves. He cited a few examples of people in the national spotlight.
“What makes a public person think they can get away with it?” I’d asked. Something I’d often wondered about.
Skip had gone on about people in power who not only think they’re immune (even when their colleagues are caught) but also are great risk takers. I was glad I wasn’t expected to understand that type of personality fully. Now, however, I wondered if Oliver Halbert had suffered from the same syndrome Skip had described and that I’d read about.
I didn’t look forward to telling Susan what we’d discovered about her brother. Dismissed charges or not, there was a blot on the image I’d had of Oliver Halbert, the crusader for clean politics. Susan would be upset, unless she already knew of her brother’s record, in which case, her worst nightmare would have come true—that I’d find out and not help her prove he was murdered.
I could almost hear her: “Just because my brother wasn’t as white as the lilies all a-bloomin’ in Nashville, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t murdered.”
I agreed with her in advance. Strangely, I was now more inclined to use the key to her brother’s apartment. The key that beckoned from my purse, three rooms and two baths away.
“Any more links you want me to open, Grandma?” Maddie asked, her words carrying that telltale slur that said she was fading.
“Not tonight, sweetheart,” I said, leading her back to bed.
Maddie crawled under the covers, which I then lifted over her shoulders, tucking her favorite afghan under her chin. She still used the baseball afghan I’d made for her father in my extreme knitting phase. More than thirty years old, and washed at least once a week when Richard used it, the red, white, and blue strands were showing signs of wear. I wondered when my granddaughter would be ready for a more mature design. It had been a while since I’d knitted or crocheted anything larger than three inches, so I might have lost patience for crafting life-size bedcovers.
Maddie’s final words of the day: “I told you, Grandma. I told you Mr. Halbert was a jailbird.”
She was asleep before I could congratulate her as well as work on synonyms with her.
Eleven o’clock seemed too late to call Susan, though last night she hadn’t considered it too late to just show up on my doorstep.
My three-hour afternoon nap killed any chance I had of getting in synch with a normal night’s sleep. I wondered about going to Oliver Halbert’s apartment, under the cover of darkness, but I still wasn’t comfortable leaving Maddie alone in the house, especially at night.
One thing I could do in my own home was return to the project lying in wait in my garage. Maddie’s room was separated from the garage by the fourth bedroom plus the entryway, so I didn’t have the excuse that noise would wake her. Besides, Maddie was like her father in that very little could wake her from a sound sleep.
I put on a warmer sweater and sturdier shoes, ready to do battle with boxes. As I walked through my kitchen to get to the garage door, I had the thought of baking more ginger cookies instead of opening cartons. My snack supply was running low. What if Skip or someone else dropped by and my cupboard was bare?
It took only one full minute for me to come to my senses and enter the garage. Opening a box labeled Bronx, in bright red marker, seemed a safe enough venture. The box must have been on the shelf with the cartons from work and Henry took it down by mistake. I placed it on my workbench, pulled up a stool, and went to work on the sealing tape.
To my surprise, the contents of the box pertained not to our life-size apartment on the Grand Concourse in New York City, but to the wonderful dollhouse replica Ken built just before he became ill. Maddie and I were still working on furnishing the model. I smiled as I thought how the dollhouse version wouldn’t have fit anywhere in the pocket-size (only six hundred and fifty square feet) apartment Ken and I lived in when we were first married.
Ken had piled all the plans for the miniature apartment, plus his notes and calculations, and scraps of extra material into the box when he’d finished. I’d been busy with a full teaching load at the time, as well as volunteer tutoring and, of course, my miniatures hobby, and hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the day-to-day progress as Ken built the apartment replica. I’d been waiting for my turn—the thrill of decorating the interior. Now I realized what pains my husband had taken to get the details correct.
He’d collected a folio of photos of the real rooms as a reminder of the layout and structural specifications. The photos were candids he’d pulled from various albums and frames.
The Bronx apartment had been Richard’s first home. I looked at a photograph of him as a toddler, his high chair wedged in a corner, his smiling, chubby face with probably more milk on it than he’d drunk. It was hard not to choke up.
Images flooded my mind—of my amazing granddaughter sleeping nearby, of my wonderful daughter-in-law, Mary Lou, of Beverly and Skip, and I felt a surge of gratitude for the family who were around me now, all stemming from Ken in one way or another.
I sniffed back any sad thoughts and reminded myself that I should be cheered by the lack of anything untoward in my first box of the night.
I pulled another box forward, this one with Drawer, Bottom Right in bold type on a label. I remembered when Ken’s secretary, Esther, an older woman we were both fond of, called to tell me the boxes were ready and that she and Artie would be bringing them by the house. At the time, I was grateful that she’d labeled the boxes so carefully because that’s what Ken would have liked. None of us could have known that I’d leave them alone while the tape dried and start to peel off, that it would take a crisis of giant proportions to get me to pay attention to the boxes again.
The contents of this box were predictable—bank records for the office account, calendars, memos to clients. I riffled through enough of the memos to be able to read the letterhead and rule out any correspondence with Patrick Lynch.
So far, so good.
At the bottom of the box was a large bulky envelope, marked Personal. I emptied the contents on my worktable and found myself facing an outfit for a child, from three to six months old, according to the brand’s label on the pink-and-white onesie. I unfolded a white bib with pink trim, and a tiny hat and jacket, both in the same pattern as the onesie.
The lovely layette must have been put into the box in error. I imagined Esther mistakenly putting clothing that belonged to the baby of one of her friends or relatives in with Ken’s records. The outfit seemed slightly worn, so it wasn’t meant to be a gift. It had been in the envelope for a long time, as attested to by places where the creases had permanently faded the fabric. I wondered if Esther had ever missed the set.
I shook out the large manila envelope to be sure I’d seen everything. Out came a small white envelope containing photographs. I took out the three photos and peered at a Polaroid shot of a young Ken Porter holding a baby. I looked more closely. In the background was a sprawling institution of some kind. It was an east-coast kind of facility with a red brick façade and large maple trees lining a long driveway and a lush green lawn. A school or hospital, I guessed, but none I recognized.
The next photo was taken on the same property, it seemed, but close up to Ken and the little girl (judging from the plethora of pink on the child). From the child’s size and the way Ken was holding it, I guessed it was not a newborn, but probably a few months old. Probably from three to six months, as the clothing label said.
Until he fell under the spell of leukemia, Ken had aged well. He’d never changed his hairstyle or gained or lost a noticeable amount of weight, so he’d looked the same (at least to me) over the course of decades. So, how old was he in these photos? It was hard to tell. I studied his clothing—casual pants and a windbreaker. Like his hair and his weight, his wardrobe was also a constant. He hadn’t been one to follow the styles of the day. I tried to remember when Polaroid cameras were popular. It had been years since I’d seen one, but I assumed they were still available.
For now, without benefit of any other information, I had to say that in these photos, Ken was either a little younger or about the same age as when I met him.
The last picture was mostly an extreme close-up of the little girl, looking absently toward the camera; only Ken’s arms and chest were showing.
I shuffled back through the three photographs. Ken had a serious expression on his face, neither happy nor displeased, but rather the straight-lipped expression he got when he was accepting something he wasn’t quite thrilled about. Maybe he wasn’t in the mood for a photo shoot that day. Maybe the baby was cranky, whoever she was.
My heart skipped. I didn’t recognize the setting, but more to the point, I didn’t recognize the baby, either.
How personal was this child?
Chapter 7
I must be very tired to get worked up about a photograph of Ken and a baby who isn’t Richard.
The nagging thought that Ken might be the subject of an investigation by the late Lincoln Point city inspector didn’t help. What else was there that I didn’t know about my husband of more than thirty years?
I needed to think rationally. Wouldn’t Ken have had friends with babies? Colleagues with children? His partner in the architectural firm was much older; the child could have been Artie’s granddaughter. Indeed, the little girl in the photograph could have been anyone. His college room-mate’s young niece. A distant cousin twice removed.
Although the harmless possibilities were endless, the fact remained that photographs of this particular baby had been worth a special place among Ken’s belongings, packed carefully among articles of clothing that it seemed would fit her, in an envelope marked Personal.
I had to take one more look at the clothing and the photographs and then I’d move on. I gathered the clothing on my lap and looked at it more closely. Besides the brand label, which I didn’t recognize, I saw a number on each piece. A black laundry mark: four nine five. Did the child, the clothing, and the institution go together? Was I looking at an orphanage? Perhaps Ken donated money to them at one time and this was a publicity photo. Maybe it wasn’t personal at all.
Did I really want to know?
Tap, tap, tap.
As light as the knocking was, it startled me. The clothing slipped off my lap. I bent to retrieve it and knocked over the pile of office correspondence and the Polaroids.
Someone was beckoning from the other side of the garage door. I moved toward it, gathering the fallen objects as I went.
“Aunt Gerry?” Skip’s voice. “It’s me. Are you okay in there?” More tapping. “The garage light is on. I figure you’re working overtime on one of your architectural projects.”
I smiled in spite of the discomfort I was feeling. The image of the large facility behind Ken and a strange child was burned in my brain.
Skip couldn’t have known how right he was.
I thought of standing perfectly still, until Skip went away, or slipping back into my house and opening the front door to him. But it was hopeless pretending I hadn’t been rummaging around in my garage. I acknowledged Skip’s knocking, directed him to the side door of the house, and let him in through the narrow passage between my house and the next.
“What’s up out here?” he asked, entering the garage. “It’s freezing. Aren’t you cold?” He stamped his feet, presumably to warm them.
Ordinarily, I’d remind my California-native nephew of how distorted his ideas of “cold” and “winter” were. “If you’d ever lived in the Bronx,” I’d tell him, “you’d know what real cold weather was like.”
But tonight I didn’t feel like reliving those days in any form.
I pulled my sweater closer. “As a matter of fact, I am cold,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”
He looked at the papers I’d been going through, now spread over the concrete floor. I followed his gaze across the littered area, to the pages on the floor. In the short time I had before answering his knock, I’d dumped the pink clothes and the photos back into the box and put another box on top of it.
“What’s all this?” he asked, his arms embracing the clutter.
“I’m just cleaning out some stuff.”
He reached down to retrieve the pages on the floor. “Let me help you with these,” Skip said.
“No need.” I rushed to stop him, bumping into him. “Really, there’s so much junk out here. It’s about time I got rid of some of it. I need more storage space for my crafts. You know how much room I need when I’m building a dollhouse. I had a nap this afternoon so I’m not sleepy at all, and I thought I might as well do something useful.”
While I rambled, Skip’s gaze flitted from one box to another, some on the workbench, some on the dusty floor. I was acutely aware of the labels: Consulting Jobs, Middle Desk Drawer, Files Credenza #1, Files Credenza #2, and so on.
“This is Uncle Ken’s stuff, isn’t it?”
“As I said, I’m cleaning up.”
“The stuff’s been here for years.” He pointed to the empty shelves above us. “I put it up there myself. There a reason you’re choosing to go through it right now?”
My look must have been pitiful. Skip came over to me and put his arms around me.
For the first time in our lives, my nephew provided me a shoulder to cry on, instead of the other way around.
My cupboard wasn’t bare, after all, and Skip availed himself of an assortment of snack food—slices of brie, crackers, an orange, and a handful of small ginger cookies—while I pulled myself together in the bathroom.
A few minutes later, we sat in the living room, the pale rug seeming to match my mood and, I believed, my complexion.
“I’m so sorry I did this to you, Aunt Gerry. It’s my fault. I should never have told you about Oliver Halbert’s stupid list.” He sounded a lot like Maddie, calling things or events stupid when it was really people who were to blame.
“What if I’d heard about it another way, Skip? Imagine how much worse it would have been for me.” What if I’d found out by emptying a box in the garage? I wanted to ask, but I had no intention of telling Skip the second cause of my distress, that I’d already discovered something unsettling in an innocently marked box.
He bit into the orange, then peeled away a section of its skin. The tangy aroma filled the air and made me thirsty. I made a motion to get up.
“What do you need?” he asked, holding his hand up.
“Just some water.” Skip played waiter and brought me a bottle of cold, sparkling mineral water. He tried to foist a snack on me, but I didn’t dare tax my digestive system. “How’s June?” I asked, switching the topic to Skip’s Chicago-born almost-fiancée (his mother and I could only hope).
“I had a postcard from her of the Willis Tower. She wrote something like, ‘Why don’t you and Gerry build this in miniature?’ It’s not a bad idea, is it?”
“It’s a great idea,” I said, though I hardly meant it. My mental catalog of dollhouse styles did not include a sky-scraper.
“If anyone could do it, it would be you and your group. Anyway, I talked to June today. She’s enjoying her new baby niece,” Skip said. He popped an orange secti
on into his mouth.
“I’ll bet she sent photos through her camera. Do you have them with you?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, she did send a couple of pictures.” Skip gave me a serious look. “Do you really want to see photos of a baby you don’t know?”
For the second time this evening, Skip had inadvertently hit the nail on its tiny head.
“No, not really,” I said.
We settled into a short silence while Skip munched and I tried to relax enough to stop the pain in my jaw.
“I have some news on Oliver Halbert,” he said, finally.
“I’m listening.”
“He’s not as clean as we thought.”
“I already know that. He has a DUI.”
“I suppose the little princess dug it up.”
I nodded. “Which makes me wonder why whoever hired him for city inspector in Lincoln Point couldn’t have dug it up.”
“That’s another story. It looks like he, uh, bribed his way into the job.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You know, some people think they’re immune—”
“I remember the theory, Skip, but this seems like an extreme example.”
“Agreed.”
“Does this information give you more incentive to investigate his death as a homicide?”
The last slice of orange and the first sample of brie-on-cracker went into Skip’s mouth, one after the other. “Somebody held up the paperwork on the ME’s suicide filing, and now all this new information makes it suspect anyway. So, yeah, we’re back to square one, and will look into the death as a possible homicide.”
“It seemed very quick to me, anyway—the suicide r uling.”
Skip looked around, as if for prying eyes or ears. “It did to me, too, so I asked around and dropped some hints. And, uh, that may have had something to do with the paperwork holdup I mentioned.”
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