Mayhem in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  “We already had a Hanukah party at school with blue and white balloons and special music. Rachel’s father came and explained everything. Then we had another party for my friend Lamont. He’s African American. Rachel and Lamont do Christmas, too, so I was thinking maybe me and Mom and Dad should celebrate Hanukah and Kwanzaa”—I held back from interrupting her flow with a grammar correction— “to be fair.”

  “And to get more presents, right?”

  “Maybe just little ones,” she said, with a wonderful, sleepy grin. “Why does my mom think I’m sick? On the phone she was asking me if I’m sure I’m okay.”

  That’s because your grandmother is paranoid. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I guess she just worries when you’re not around.”

  “Do you know the seven principles of Kwanzaa?”

  I had to admit I did not, and it was too late to flip through the book to find out. Maddie enlightened me by naming two of the principles—unity and faith, which were all she could remember. “The others were more complicated, but I could look it up for you,” she said.

  “Not tonight, sweetheart.”

  I had enough to think about.

  Chapter 11

  I took a cup of chamomile tea to my reading corner in the atrium—comfortable in any weather. Tonight was clear, with the fresh, postrain smell that I loved seeping through the seams of the skylight. There’d be no white Christmas in Lincoln Point, California, but I couldn’t ask for everything.

  Too many isolated facts rattled around my brain. I needed to sort them out. The way that usually worked for me at times like this was to talk to myself as if I were trying to explain the plot of Macbeth to high school freshmen. I gazed with longing at the pile of books on my table—novels for pleasure reading—and started my one-woman lesson, talking to myself as both teacher and student.

  First, Dolores is living well beyond her means, and lied or tricked her way into getting her grandmother the best deal and the most expensive quarters at the Mary Todd. She also withheld her old address from the intake form. None of that is so bad, unless Dolores is moonlighting as a cat burglar to pay for her and her grandmother’s lifestyle.

  Not that it’s any of my business. But a murder in Lincoln Point is my business, in a way, and after seeking out my help, Dolores misrepresented her connection to the victim. Also, the prime suspect is a student crafter with a special place in my heart.

  It’s impossible to know whether the seemingly indisputable facts about Dolores and her grandmother have anything to do with the events of Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

  For which there are two theories.

  The police believe that Sofia Muniz, being of questionable mind, left her rooms late Wednesday and wandered out into the night. Dressed in her nightclothes, she walked, unnoticed, almost two miles to her old neighborhood. She coincidentally ran into a current resident, Carl Tirado, aka Carlos Guzman, the coyote who took her family’s life savings. Carlos was responsible for the death of the man who would have been her grandson-in-law, thus leaving her granddaughter a single mother and her great-granddaughter without a father. Sofia, a tall, large-boned woman, found a weapon of opportunity, a rusty piece of rebar, and beat the drunken Carlos to death. This activity left her covered in Carlos’s blood. She then remained there until Gus Boudette, the Mary Todd van driver, found her. Although that address was not listed in Sofia’s file, Gus knew exactly where to look for her. Gus didn’t cover this up in any way, never claiming to have looked for her anywhere else.

  Now the alternative theory—mine—glued together from scraps of observations from Mary Todd residents (put that way, I have a hard time believing it myself). Sofia might be the victim of a clever framer (not the kind who places tiny photos in miniature frames as Maddie did for me, thank you, sweetheart).

  Sandy Sechrest, Sofia’s next-door neighbor at the Mary Todd, saw two men in a light brown van with bars haul Sofia away late Wednesday night. (Involuntarily? I’m not sure. I should check on this. If Sandy will ever speak to me again.) The Field of Dream Fences van (do I have the best granddaughter, or what?), belonging to Abe’s Hardware, has a logo that can be interpreted as the prison bars Sandy mentioned. Come to think of it, this would also explain why Sofia keeps claiming that she’s already been to jail—she thought she was in jail when she was in the van with the bars.

  This is good.

  On that self-congratulatory note, I took a break to pull some sad-looking leaves from my jade plant and get another cup of tea, this time adding a cookie to the saucer and a sweater over my shoulders.

  Back to work. There’s still a lot to organize.

  Gus works at the video store downtown, not Abe’s Hardware in the Field of Dream Fences department. Too bad, because he’s a likely suspect. I hope it’s not his earring or unnaturally straw-colored, long hair that puts me off about him. I think it’s the shifty-eyed way he lied about having been paged. I’ll bet he just didn’t want to talk to us because he was afraid he’d let something slip. Now there’s a stretch.

  Hmmm. If Sandy’s van story is as good as it’s now looking, then maybe the other residents’ statements have kernels of truth also. Such as that of Emma (Lizzie? Why can’t I keep them straight? I had no trouble with the Jackson twins in AP English). One of them saw Sofia in the garden late at night with Dolores, though Dolores claims only to have called, not seen, her grandmother around seven thirty p.m.

  That can be another of Dolores’s lies. Of course, I don’t suspect Dolores of the murder. If she did it, she would never let Sofia take the blame even for a minute. One thing I’m sure of is that Dolores loves her grandmother very much and is devoted to her well-being. I wonder why Dolores hasn’t called me. She’s obviously found another driver. More likely, my usefulness is over since I don’t have sway with my nephew and, now that the cat is out of the bag about her grandmother, there’s no need to sneak around with an anonymous “friend.” My goodness, do I regret that Dolores hasn’t called me in a day?

  Back to the residents. Mr. Mooney, the Wandering Irishman, said that someone named Ethel Hudson knows everything about what happened to Sofia Muniz. I wonder who Ethel Hudson is? Resident or staff? Mr. Mooney’s deceased wife, probably! I can ask Linda, who’ll be here tomorrow with Jason. She’d never just drop him off. I hope she doesn’t stay while Jason and I are talking. That would be awful for Jason and counterproductive for the tutoring goal.

  I guess I’m about finished. Just for completeness, though, I should add everyone else connected with this case, as far as I know it. There’s the uptight Ms. Hawkes, the financial manager. Her motive could be . . . what? Nothing I can think of, unless the Mary Todd’s accounts are involved. Steve Talley has a motive. He’d love to discredit Dolores, get his proposal through, and be uncontested for the promotion at city hall. Of course, why not just discredit Dolores? It seems pretty extreme to kill someone you don’t know just to frame your rival’s grandmother.

  What about the other Mary Todd residents? There’s that theory that killers show up at funerals and other places where their crimes are discussed, so I suppose I should include the crafters. Lizzie, Emma, Mr. Mooney, Sandy, Gertie . . . Nah, I don’t think so.

  Wait, Carl spent most of his work time at the Nancy Hanks residence. What about the people there? Right, that adds a host of staff and patients. Not much I can do about them.

  Skip’s job is harder than I thought.

  That’s about it. Terrific. There are giant holes in both theories. Too many coincidences in the police theory and too many unfounded assumptions and unreliable witnesses in the alternative theory. And too many other people in Lincoln Point and surrounding towns whom I haven’t even considered. I should quit and play with Maddie all week.

  That’s exactly what I’ll do. Except for checking out a few things.

  I was happy with my session with myself.

  There were a couple of issues it would be easy to clarify, like whether Dolores was at the Mary Todd between seven thirty on We
dnesday night and some time after nine thirty on Thursday morning, when she called me.

  I started a list, with that as number one.

  Number two was to find out who Ethel Hudson was.

  Number three, to see whether Video Jeff’s arcade, where Gus worked, had a van. Maybe its logo was an even better fit to what Sandy saw. I pictured an ad for a video game that featured a giant super-antihero behind bars. Or was that anti-superhero? I doubted the Oxford English Dictionary had a listing. Maybe there was a Mr. BarMan. I was singularly lacking in knowledge of the comics-turned-movies genre. I’d see if Maddie could use her magic Internet fingers to help with this.

  Number three-B, still under Gus, was to try to determine how he knew where to pick up Sofia that morning.

  Number four was to get a timeline based on what the residents saw, if at all possible. It would be very helpful to know exactly what time their observations were made. Maybe I could get them to hook the hour to a television show, or a regular phone call from a family member, or when they took their pills, or some other part of their daily routine.

  I’d done all I could without a sounding board. At nine thirty in the evening, I knew my favorite one would still be up and dressed. I called Beverly Gowen and invited her for tea.

  While I waited for Beverly, I refilled the kettle, turned on the gas under it, and took out her special tea. Beverly kept a package of chai in my cabinet, which neither I nor any other guest ever drank. I cleared a chair for her, and by the way glanced through the newspapers that had covered it. I was behind in my reading of the Lincolnite, our local newspaper, as usual.

  I wondered if the story of Carlos’s murder had been covered yet. It had been only a day. I flipped through, passing up stories under headlines about a slight-injury hit-and-run on Gettysburg Boulevard, a wine festival scheduled for early in the new year, and budget cuts for school lunches.

  Buried at the bottom of the fourth page was news of the death of Carl Tirado, aka Carlos Guzman. I folded the paper lengthwise and read. After the standard date and time, the short article reported:

  Guzman’s body was found in a parking lot in Nolin Creek Pines. Guzman was a fugitive from justice for decades, the police said today. A notebook found in his apartment revealed many schemes to defraud citizens in all walks of life in Lincoln Point and surrounding towns. The police think he met his death due to a drunken fall.

  A drunken fall in the parking lot? Hmmm. It seemed my one-on-one lecture to myself had been for naught. Either Sofia had been cleared through some fast, efficient police work, or Dolores had used some influence to keep her grandmother’s “person of interest” status quiet. If the part about the notebook was true, then dozens more suspects “in all walks of life” had now stepped into the lineup.

  Frustrated, I tossed the newspaper into the recycle stack. A byline flashed before my eyes, in the article above the Guzman piece: Christine Gallagher, a former student who went on to major in English at the University of California in Riverside. Chrissy’s article reported on a proposal by Steve Talley, city hall administrator (and, though it wasn’t mentioned, Dolores’s competition for the next step up), to refurbish Nolin Creek Park. The article was speciously neutral, but the quotes were all from Talley, giving away Chrissy’s (or the Lincolnite’s) position.

  I wondered if “girl reporter” Chrissy Gallagher had fond recollections of the English teacher who chose her patriotic essay for the VFW award in the late nineties? Would she return the favor by sharing information on where and how the Lincolnite got its facts about Guzman? It seemed obvious where she got her “facts” about the Talley Restoration Plan.

  Was I really thinking of tracking down a reporter? Enough. For what seemed like the tenth time in thirty-six hours, I checked myself out of the Muniz/Guzman case.

  “What a day,” Beverly said, stretching her long, well-toned legs in front of her. “After I left you, I went to my assignment for the force.” She sipped her chai. “I love saying that. ‘The force.’ ”

  I smiled—whatever made Beverly happy made me happy. “I know.”

  “Even though I’m just a volunteer.”

  “Not ‘just,’ Beverly. You’re too modest. The volunteers save Lincoln Point a lot of time and money.”

  “One hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars in the first quarter, to be exact.”

  “And you keep us safe by”—I put my hand over my heart—“serving and protecting.”

  Beverly’s charming overbite smile warmed my chilly atrium. “We should probably quit before an American flag drops down from your skylight. Did I tell you they’ve added serving subpoenas to the list of things the volunteers can do? There are some people I’d love to serve, but we don’t get to choose.”

  “About today?” I reminded her.

  “Yes, very exciting. I was on a routine vacation house check on Knob Creek Road, and I noticed a mailman on the porch. What’s wrong with this picture? I asked myself.”

  It took me a few seconds. “If the family’s on vacation, they must have put a hold on their mail.”

  She saluted me with her teacup, sending a spicy aroma across the table. “Right. Not everyone does, but still, it was worth a closer look. So I check out the alleged mailman. No one I recognized, and by now I know all the postal workers. I pull over.” Pause for effect. I pictured Beverly in the special car volunteers sometimes drove, white, with an amber bar light on the roof. “I call for backup, just in case, though the guy looked about fourteen. Well, he sees me and walks nonchalantly down the stairs, then breaks into a run on the sidewalk. Idiot. I’m in a car, right?”

  “Did you catch him?”

  Beverly gave an emphatic nod. “It was pretty funny, actually. I’m not supposed to get out of the car in a case like this, just try to trap him. So for about five minutes until a black-and-white came, I played tag with him and finally pinned him against a fence.”

  Whew. I’d been holding my breath, just imagining this, let alone being part of such a bust. I didn’t like the idea of Beverly’s taking down a criminal, no matter what his age, given her heart condition. But she looked so pleased, her fuchsia sweatshirt adding a blush of color to her cheeks. Listening to her bright voice, I couldn’t spoil the moment by issuing a health warning. She knew what she was doing, I told myself.

  “Where did he get a postal uniform?”

  “Uniforms of any kind are easier to find than you think. When they took him in, they found his little mail pouch full of checkbooks, bank statements, and credit cards, all different names. He’d hit a bunch of houses where residents were on vacation. So he’d have signatures and account numbers. He even had a few little sticky notes with passwords, presumably. Setting himself up for a nice little identity theft business.”

  “I thought people did that through computers.”

  “Just because a new form of crime comes on the scene, it doesn’t mean an old one goes away. Lots of crooks still operate the old-fashioned way.”

  “Didn’t he realize a mailman might look out of place if the people were gone?”

  “Who said crooks are smart? In that neighborhood everybody works, so he probably thought he was safe.”

  “What a day, as you said.”

  “That’s not all. After that I get a call from Nick Marcus. He’s in charge of the volunteer program.” And Skip’s in charge of getting me to date him, I said to myself. “He called me back to the station, which was unusual. He said I was needed for a special job. To train someone new. I went back, and there was a party for me! To celebrate my one thousand hours of volunteer work.” Beverly dug in her purse. “I have photos. They printed them right there on this little machine attached to the camera.”

  I shuffled through the package of four-by-sixes. Many shots of Beverly in her volunteer outfit, black pants and a white shirt with a LPPD VOLUNTEER patch over the pocket.

  “There’s Nick,” Beverly said, pointing to the tallest person in the group photo. “Kinda cute for an old guy, isn’t he?”
>
  “Don’t start. And remember, I’ve met him a few times at the station. He’s not as cute as he looks here.”

  “Cute or not, he’s recommended me for head trainer for the volunteers. It comes with beaucoup perks.”

  “Sweet deal.”

  “You sound like my son. Everything is ‘sweet’ to him these days. I think it’s June Chinn’s influence. I mean, that he’s crazy about her.”

  “I’m practicing youthspeak so I can communicate with the next generation,” I told her. “And the one after that.”

  “So . . . it’s your turn,” Beverly said. “Here I am rambling on about my own stuff and you probably want to talk about the Muniz case.”

  “Not anymore.” I pulled the Lincolnite out of recycling. “Did you see this?”

  Beverly read the short article quickly. “Oh, yeah. I heard about that. It’s a placeholder.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m just guessing, but I saw Dolores in the PD building yesterday, and I assume she convinced them not to issue any information until they’re ready to charge her grandmother. As a diversion to keep the press at bay, they simply say it was an accident. They’re still waiting for blood work before charging Sofia. It takes forever.”

  “How hard can it be? They have the blood from Sofia’s clothes and the blood from Carlos’s body.”

  “You’d think it would be easy, but remember how backed up our crime labs are. It’s not like television where”—she snapped her fingers—“they have even DNA results in a flash, between commercials.”

  Uh-oh. I’d forgotten. One of Beverly’s pet projects was enlightening us ordinary citizens about the pitiful state of crime labs throughout the country. Apparently, people, both innocent and guilty, sit waiting for months or years for results while untested evidence collects on shelves and degrades. The lack of funding for staff and equipment for crime labs was a major concern of Beverly and her ilk.