Mayhem in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

She shook her head, meaning, I took it, that she didn’t want her son to know she was putting this much effort into a date.

  “You’re welcome, by the way,” I said to Skip.

  I heard his deep laugh. “Okay, you’re right. I do have you to thank for uncovering that little scheme Dolores cooked up. I’m sure you realize it only strengthens the case against Sofia Muniz.”

  Any comment would only be repeating myself, so I let it go. “Any news on Gus Boudette, the van driver?”

  “He’s still MIA.”

  “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “We’re keeping that option open.”

  “Whatever that means. I have another lead for you. There’s something going on with the finances at the Mary Todd.”

  “Against my better judgment, I’m listening.”

  I gave Skip a brief rundown on Ethel Hudson, Juanita Ramirez, and Dominik Ostrowsky.

  “If I promise to check this out, will you keep your distance?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Weren’t you even a little scared last night when you saw your car sitting on its axles?”

  “A little. Let me know what you find at the Mary Todd, okay?”

  “New subject. Have you talked to my mom today?”

  Mom was in front of me again, this time with an ankle-length blue chiffon. “Mother of the bride,” I mouthed. Beverly threw up her hands and marched back to the dressing room.

  “I did talk to her.” Not a lie. “She seems pretty happy with her blossoming social life.”

  “I can’t believe I was trying to fix up the wrong couple.”

  “I can.”

  A grunt. “Oh, hey, what did you mean about the license plate on the vehicle following you? I couldn’t understand the message you left. We have a couple of different cars on your tail.”

  “Is that present tense?” I looked outside Willie’s window for the Escalade. How would I be able to identify any other car? Would there be a man in dark glasses sitting behind the wheel with a cup of coffee and a newspaper? “Does every citizen of Lincoln Point get this escort service, besides instant tire-changing?”

  “Until we find out who slashed your tires. In a case like this we’d look at the camera footage and check the license plates of the cars in the lot, but everybody and his brother was at the ball, so that’s useless.”

  “And no one showed up on camera with a machete?”

  A big sigh. “I wish. Whoever did it either knows where the cameras are, or is just plain lucky. You owe us for those new tires, by the way. There’ll be a bill in the mail.”

  “I should hope so. I still want to know what the vanity plate refers to.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He had no idea? Then the Escalade was not a policeman’s vanity-plate car. Back to the shivery feeling of being followed. Did the cop car see the Escalade? When a cop follows a person does he notice who else is following that person? These weren’t questions for Skip at this time.

  “Aunt Gerry? What was that plate again? Spell it for me.”

  “Never mind. I was confused for a minute.”

  “Aunt Gerry? What’s going on?”

  There was no call-waiting beep, but Skip didn’t have to know that.

  “Gotta go,” I said.

  Green was Beverly’s best color, as it was for all the redheaded Porters. I gave thumbs-up to a rich green calf-length dress with long sleeves and a smattering of black embroidery on the bodice.

  We left Lori Leigh’s and picked up Maddie. I’d given her an advance on her week’s spending money, which was holed up in some secret place in her room. On the last visit she’d kept her money at the bottom of a mug of pens and pencils, producing a considerable number of ink splotches on the face and beard of none other than Abraham Lincoln, whose portrait graced her fives.

  Today while Maddie was demonstrating how her new soccer kneepads tied on, I scrutinized every parked car in the lot.

  Chapter 21

  An intriguing answering machine message from Chrissy Gallagher captured my attention when I got home around three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. I played it and then played it again.

  “I have the item we talked about.” Chrissy’s voice sounded lower than her normal pitch, and muffled, as if she’d cupped her hand over the phone. “I hope we can get together to pool our resources. Give me a call.”

  The item? Carlos Guzman’s notebook, I assumed. I felt the rush of anticipation, then caution took over. Did I really want to pursue an investigation with a reporter when (a) I might be the target of a stalker, (b) my tires might have been slashed as a warning, and (c) through (z) it was none of my business?

  On the other hand, I wasn’t positive about either (a) or (b). Maybe Skip didn’t realize one of his cops was using his private S-something-CH Escalade. (I pushed right past the absurdity of an LPPD cop driving a Cadillac on a tailing mission.) As for (b), I made a note to check the “police blotter” section of the Lincolnite for the frequency of tire-slashingincidents, especially on evenings such as last night when nearly the whole town was focusing on the ball.

  I didn’t have to worry about entertaining Maddie for the rest of the day. She was getting changed to go with June to her gym, where they had an indoor pool, pickup sports for kids, and, counterproductively, a vending machine filled with junk food. My granddaughter’s idea of heaven. June offered to give Maddie tennis lessons (I knew she’d bought her a racket for Christmas), which I applauded. It was time she took up something more ladylike than soccer.

  Before I could decide whether to return Chrissy’s call, my landline rang.

  An exasperated Linda. “You’re not picking up your cell,” she said.

  “The battery’s probably dead, from talking to you all day.” I put a smile in my voice, just in case Linda was in one of her sensitive moods. “What’s new?”

  “Gerry, you won’t believe this. Mr. Mooney almost died.” She paused to take a drink, probably her daily low-fat latte with whipped cream, causing a flurry of anxiety in my chest. “When I got to the lobby they were taking him to the care center.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s kind of confused right now. Nadine is the one who called for help. She said she saw him passed out on the couch. It was like a miracle that a troupe of EMTs who were here for a tour happened to be a few feet away, on their way out the door.”

  “Did he have a heart attack?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently he just fell over. Knocked one of those miniature Christmas trees off the table. Well, they’re not really miniature, just the small tabletop kind.”

  I took a seat at my kitchen table, stretching the phone cord to its limit. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “They think so. His great-granddaughter is here. She’s blaming herself because she was late and she thinks he got upset about that and that’s what brought it on.”

  “Is that even likely?”

  “No, not really. I told her it was a good thing she was late, because at least he had his attack here and could be attended to. What if they’d been on the road?”

  Much as I’d wanted to hear something nefarious about Nadine Hawkes, I couldn’t fault someone who’d saved the life of an old man who wanted to live long enough to give his great-granddaughter a handcrafted treasure.

  Not that I didn’t still have questions about Nadine’s life as a bookkeeper.

  “Aren’t you coming to the gym with us?” Maddie asked, noticing my nonworkout attire.

  “Not today. I have some errands to take care of before dinner.”

  She put her hands on her hips, or, technically, where her hips would be some day. “Are you still snooping around?”

  I put my hands on my already formed hips and frowned as best I could, given her comic stance. “Where did you hear that?”

  “I heard Uncle Skip tell June.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. By the way—and this has nothing to do with the case�
�but I was wondering if it’s possible for someone to go online and see who has a certain vanity plate?”

  “You can track any license plate but you have to pay.”

  “Track? You mean trace back to its owner?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Someone can just put in my license plate number and find me?” I didn’t know why I was startled since that’s exactly what I wanted to do, but the easy access to so much information these days still astonished me.

  “Uh-huh,” Maddie said. “You don’t have to pay to see if the word you want on your license plate is already taken, but if you want to look up the owner you have to pay. It’s, like, about forty dollars. You get the name and address, the kind of car it is, all kinds of stuff.” Her face brightened. “Do you want to sign up?”

  “No, never mind.”

  “Yeah, it’s a lot of money.”

  It wasn’t the money, which, sadly, wasn’t prohibitive enough to prevent your average thief or predator from gaining access. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be a registered license plate looker-upper. I’d never used my credit card online and I didn’t want to start now, with a project like this. I’d have to find another way to figure out who was following me. If anyone.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked Maddie.

  “Dad wanted to get a plate that said surgery or something, so we looked it up. But then Mom said it was too show-offy and then Dad agreed so we didn’t get one. But I remembered how to do it.”

  “Good for you. You’re a wonderful research assistant.”

  “Grandma, if you have a license plate you want to trace, I could just go up and down the streets and look and see who gets in the car. Jason said I could borrow one of his bikes any time. He has two that are too small for him.”

  I pictured my granddaughter trolling the hills and vales of Lincoln Point, like Harriet the Spy, with her little notebook, gathering intelligence on friends and neighbors, writing down license plates, and makes and models of cars.

  “I’ll let you know, sweetheart. We should call your parents this evening, okay? And you can tell them about the ball.”

  “Sure.”

  And I can ask how Richard is.

  When June arrived to collect Maddie and her I-heart-soccer duffel bag, I took the opportunity to quiz her.

  I began, “Maddie said Skip said . . . ,” then rephrased. “So Skip thinks I’m snooping?”

  She gave me her winning smile.

  “Skip says you think someone is following you and you won’t give him the plates. Is that right?”

  I smiled back. “Ah, now he’s got you working for him?”

  “He’s just concerned. He doesn’t understand why you wouldn’t tell him if you think a car other than a police vehicle is tailing you.”

  I wasn’t sure myself. I knew I didn’t want the LPPD questioning someone and finding out it was all a big misunderstanding or a coincidence. It might not even have been the same car behind me in every incident. I didn’t always see the plates straight on, especially when I was trying to drive at the same time, and surely there was more than one blue Escalade in Lincoln Point. Also there’d been no S-something-CH in my rearview mirror all morning. Maybe STITCH or SWATCH or SNITCH had noticed the cop cars and called off his campaign. Maybe he went back East to celebrate the holidays in winter weather. Darned if I knew.

  “What if I’m wrong? I’ll feel pretty foolish,” I said to June.

  “Better safe than sorry,” she said.

  A wise young woman.

  Maddie dragged her duffel bag to the foyer and kissed me good-bye. “Are you sure you don’t need an assistant this afternoon, Grandma?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I always miss all the fun.”

  “What?” June said, in mock indignation. “We two are going to the most fun place in town.”

  “I wish I could go,” I said.

  Maddie grinned at June. “I was just teasing.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  I plugged in my car phone charger and called Chrissy on the way to the Mary Todd. I was a real cell phone pro at this point.

  “About the item?” I asked her, playing into her clandestine mood.

  “Yes, that item has names and numbers.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  It didn’t hurt to try.

  We set up a meeting at the café inside Rosie’s bookstore for around five. That gave me at least an hour at the Mary Todd to check on Mr. Mooney and perhaps pay Sofia Muniz a little visit. She was a free woman now, though Skip reminded me that could change. It was possible that her granddaughter might not be a free woman too much longer, however, depending on how the DA viewed Dolores’s years of blackmailing Carlos Guzman.

  I wondered if it mattered that she hadn’t picked someone at random to blackmail, but felt sincerely that she was simply exacting justice.

  Thanks to a friend on the inside, I didn’t have to sign in or request pesky permissions to go up in the elevator to the now-familiar Mary Todd care center. I hadn’t spent this much time in a care facility since the awful days of Ken’s illness when we traipsed from one hospital, hospice, or clinic to another hoping for good news that never came.

  Once again, I called up good memories—our faces covered with paint splotches as we tried to spruce up our drab first apartment; Ken’s arrival at my bedside with furry pussy willows when Richard was born; his joy at surprising me with a “real” wedding ring, once we could afford it—and brought myself to the present.

  Linda briefed me on Mr. Mooney’s status, ending with, “They’re saying it might have been just an allergic reaction. They’ll probably do some kind of tox screen and compare it with his chart. In any case he’s out of the woods.”

  “Would this be a reaction to something he took a while ago, or something just given to him while he was sitting there?”

  She shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe he started a new medication. I haven’t seen his chart.”

  “Or he was given the wrong medication?” I thought of the photo-matching method of distributing serious doses of medicine to the patients in the care center.

  “I’d like to say that never happens, but no system is perfect, unfortunately. I did clear the way for you to have a few words with him, if you want”—she grinned—“while I take Jane to the office to fill out some forms.”

  “Yes, I want,” I said.

  Mr. Mooney looked older than ever, like a piece of cellophane tape that had dried up, turned yellow, and had no more sticking power.

  “You look wonderful,” I said to him, setting the flowers I’d picked up in the gift shop on a side table.

  He frowned at me. “Miss Hawkes came.”

  “Yes, I heard she arrived just in time to get you some help.” Save your life seemed a frightening phrase, given the way he looked.

  “I shouldn’t have been talking to Miss Muniz.”

  “You mean Sofia?”

  “No, no.” A frustrated slamming of his fist on the bed-sheets. I doubted the cotton fabric even felt it. “Her granddaughter. She argued with me. I refused to do what she asked, but Miss Hawkes didn’t believe me.”

  “What didn’t she believe?”

  “I told you—that I can keep a secret. Don’t you understand, either? He gave me something to take. Something I saw in the pharmacy.”

  He? We were off again, it seemed. “Do you mean ‘she’ gave you something, Mr. Mooney? Ms. Hawkes?”

  “He gave it to me because I saw him in the pharmacy.”

  Mr. Mooney’s voice was weaker with each alleged answer. It seemed cruel to keep him talking, but it was to protect him, also, I told myself.

  “When were you in the pharmacy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe at Easter.”

  “But it was Ms. Hawkes who found you, today, right? And gave you medicine.”

  “Yes, she helped me. Then all the doctors came.”

  It seemed to m
e that the sequence of events got pretty scrambled in poor Mr. Mooney’s brain. Then I remembered what I’d come for. One more question.

  “What can you tell me about Dominik Ostrowsky, Mr. Mooney?”

  Another fist-slamming gesture, weaker than the others, and accompanied by a smile. “Ha. That’s me.”

  “You’re Dominik?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I heard a heavy sigh and a loud throat-clearing. I turned to see Ms. Hawkes in the doorway. She had her hands on her wide hips, looking even more comical than Maddie did with that stance.

  She addressed me with a scolding tone. “How fortunate that Miss Mooney came to me about her great-grandfather’s fees. And mentioned that he had a visitor. Apparently, Mrs. Porter, you have no regard for an old man’s health.”

  “I’m beginning to think the same of you,” I said. “Are you qualified to administer medicine?”

  “I do not administer medicine, Mrs. Porter, not that it’s any of your business. Visiting hours are over.”

  I couldn’t help noticing how the little silhouette of Mary Todd Lincoln on Nadine’s rectangular nameplate bounced up and down with her heaving chest as her remarks and attitude grew more and more intense.

  I turned back to Mr. Mooney. “I’ll be sure my nurse friend, Mrs. Reed, looks in on you regularly,” I said, in a loud voice, directed as much to Ms. Hawkes as to the patient. “She has direct contact with my nephew, Detective Skip Gowen, also, should you need anything.”

  I said this as if I had authority over both the Mary Todd nursing staff and the Lincoln Point Police Department.

  My cell phone, still attached to its car charger, rang as I was on my way to meet Chrissy Gallagher at the bookstore café.

  “Gerry, I need help.”

  Not Mr. Mooney or Dolores or Linda or Skip, or anyone connected to the Carlos Guzman murder case. Rather, it was Beverly. I had a feeling she was still obsessing over her new love life.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He wants to go to dinner tonight.”

  “Who?”

  “Not funny, Gerry. The retirement party isn’t until Friday, but Nick called to see if I’m free tonight.”

  Stop the world. Here I was struggling to piece together the Mr. Mooney story—an argument with Dolores Muniz? An allergic reaction? Medicine from Nadine Hawkes, yes or no? All this since I left him on the couch in the lobby this morning?—and my otherwise mature, very intelligent sister-in-law was in the throes of a second adolescence.