“Thanks, Mr. Mooney,” I said. “You should take your pills now.” I tucked in his blanket and patted him on the shoulder, as if he were a toddler.
Back to square one.
My visit with Mr. Mooney discouraged me, but I still had to deliver my little plastic tote with a sink attached to the bottom. If nothing else, it was time I paid my old student and friend, Sofia Muniz, a visit. I’d been glad to hear from Linda that Sofia was back in her luxury quarters, at least until further notice on her granddaughter’s finances.
I knocked on her door and heard a soft “come in.”
Sofia was sitting across the room in front of her wide living room window, a lovely pink bed jacket covering her broad shoulders and adding color to her cheeks.
“Dolores won’t be here until after work,” she said.
“I’m here to see you, Sofia,” I said, surprised Dolores still had a job. I hesitated to ask if she’d been demoted, perhaps even ushered out of city hall. I imagined an ecstatic Steve Talley spearheading the move.
“Oh, Geraldine, of course. For a minute I thought I was back in . . . oh, never mind.”
She held out her arms and we had a long embrace.
“Please sit down,” she said, her smile as broad and pleasant as if she’d been taken to the care center for nothing more than a winter cold.
I found it understandable that Sofia had been confused for a moment, having spent a night in the trashy, littered parking lot of her old neighborhood and a couple in the care center, under guard. I was happy to have a few minutes alone with her, to offer some companionship.
I removed the sink from its carrier and handed it to her. I was sorry Maddie wasn’t there to see Sofia’s smile and the delight in her eyes as she turned it around and around. She ran her finger over the tiny silver finding from a broken necklace, shaped like a washer with jagged edges. I’d pushed it into the wet clay and, behold, I had a drain cap.
“So clever. Leave it to you to use something everyone else would throw away. It’s wonderful, Geraldine. It takes me back to my happy, old kitchen.” Sofia’s eyes teared up as she fingered the cloth. “This is almost the exact pattern of a sink falda I had in the old country when Dolores was little.”
I assumed falda was skirt. “I think there were only three fabric patterns in those days,” I said, getting a broader smile from her.
Sofia’s English was good, moderately accented. I figured she’d been in the United States about twenty years, since Dolores was pregnant with Ernestine. I was sure Dolores was responsible for the fact that she was fluent in the language of their adopted country. Like Lourdes Pino, however, she slipped back to a Spanish word or phrase at times.
She moved her head as if to inspect every corner of her smartly appointed suite, named for Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s general and two presidents after him. I followed her gaze. To the tabletop Christmas tree (Dolores had put one in every room), to the wall of family photographs (likewise), to the door to her bedroom where a lavish comforter covered the bed. “But you know, I’m starting to like it here, in spite of everything.”
I longed to ask her about “everything,” that is, what happened the night she was kidnapped and taken to her old neighborhood (my theory). I was afraid it might upset her, however. I was also afraid Dolores might walk in on us and not take too kindly to my interrogation, if not my very presence in her grandmother’s quarters.
Sofia solved my problem. “You know, I’ve wanted to talk to you. I consider you my amiga and I hope you don’t think I did anything bad to Carlos. As much as I hated that evil man, I could never commit such a sin.”
“I didn’t think so for a minute, Sofia.”
“I know I was very confused that night. Something didn’t agree with me.”
“Something you ate?”
“Maybe, but I think I got the wrong medicine. There was a different person handing it out. There was a substitute that night, not the man from the farmacia. I think it was the man who came and took me to jail.” She laughed. “Well, I know I said that, but now I realize it was just a different van, not jail. The medicine confused me.”
I had the feeling this was not the same problem Mr. Mooney had had. Not a dose of a drug with a potentially lethal side effect. Instead, there was a good chance that Sofia was forced to take something to make her not dead, but delusional, in the perfect position to be framed for murder.
Given the two incidents, I guessed something was amiss in the farmacia.
A knock on the door, followed by a swift entrance, ended this train of thought. Dolores swept into the room, carrying two shopping bags of wrapped presents. She stopped short when she saw me.
For a moment I was afraid she’d swing the bags into me. But she dropped them and came over to the window where Sofia and I were sitting. She embraced her grandmother and—to my surprise—me.
“You might think I hate you, Geraldine, but you really did me a favor.”
“Tell her about your new job, querida,” Sofia said.
“You found a new job in less than a day?”
“It’s not exactly employment. I won’t be getting a salary.
I still have to figure that one out. I’ll be volunteering with the Senior to Senior Foundation.” Dolores threw her head back and chuckled. “Obviously, they need help managing their program.”
Though she didn’t say it in front of her grandmother, I was sure this was part of her deal with the DA. And a clever one, at that. Win-win, I thought. I wondered if Catholics still went to confession—Dolores had the aura of the newly cleansed.
“Good for you,” I said.
It was time to leave Sofia with her granddaughter and get back to my own.
I hugged both women. “I hope you’ll be in class this week,” I said to Sofia. “You need to finish the Vatican.”
“I’ll be glad to be back.” She took a deep breath. “Well, I guess it all worked out for the best. I can’t say I’m sorry Carlos is dead, but”—she made the sign of the cross—“may he rest in peace.”
Another statement that called for a silent “amen.”
Maddie had taken full advantage of my vulnerable position, loading up with books from Rosie’s children’s shelves. She couldn’t know how it thrilled me. Or maybe she did.
“Your parents will be packing up the car pretty soon,” I said, with no ulterior motive.
“Uh-huh. Poor Mom, with Dad the way he is.”
An EKG would have shown a blip in my heartbeat at that moment. I resisted turning around in the driver’s seat to face Maddie full front. “What do you mean? What’s wrong with your dad?”
“You know how he is. He’s a backseat driver and he’ll make the trip miserable for the first ten miles, telling my mom which lane to be in or to go faster, then my mom will stop the car at a gas station and tell him if he doesn’t quit nagging, he has to drive the whole way himself, and then he’ll be good for a few miles, and that’s how it will be all the way to here.”
I laughed, relieved. “I know how he is,” I said.
I couldn’t wait to know for sure.
Late Monday evening, my phone rang. How boring, I thought, just a few notes with no melody. I wondered if landline phones could be programmed to play music. It was Maddie’s fault—I felt myself sinking down into the land of pop culture.
Beverly’s caller ID appeared on my little box.
“Nick and I are officially dating,” she said.
“Do I want to know any more than that?”
“Uh, no. Just that I’d like to invite him to Christmas dinner. I don’t think he’s ever met Richard.”
“That will be nice.”
“You’re okay with this, right?”
“Beverly, what a question. Of course.”
“Good, because it is your house.”
I tried to make my laugh sound as genuine as Beverly’s. It’s a good thing we were separated by a few miles with no video available.
“What’s new on the force? Any good sto
ries?” I asked.
“Nothing much. Just my regular rounds.” A brief sound for call-waiting. Hers. “I’d better take that,” she said.
We signed off.
I missed Beverly. I missed her “force” stories and her thoughtful advice on things large and small. So many times in the past few days I would have called her and talked over what was happening. It hit me now with full force. I hadn’t told her I was being followed or that my car was vandalized. She didn’t know my concern for my friend, Sofia, or my newfound awareness of how seniors are regarded in our society.
I hadn’t even shared my suspicions that Richard was ill.
Why not?
Because I didn’t want to cast shadows on her current state of dating bliss? Or because I no longer trusted her to care?
It was a great loss in my life of late and I didn’t know whose fault it was. I pulled the afghan around me and tried to shake off a feeling of abandonment.
Chapter 26
It was all wrapped up, like the piles of presents under my tree, each one sealed and tagged, and the latest package of Christmas cards, all the same size, ready to drop in the mail.
Dolores Muniz was guilty of blackmail. Nadine Hawkes had committed fraud, murder, and attempted murder. Gus Boudette was on a tropical island.
Too bad it wasn’t as neat as it sounded. Like when I think I’ve finished a miniature scene and something is off. Maybe there’s too much of one color, or the scale is inconsistent and the chair is too big with respect to the desk.
Once I did a subway scene and cut out a couple of inches of the New York Times to fold and lay on a seat. Every time I looked at it my attention was drawn to the print on the newspaper page. No matter how I tried to ignore the fact that the print was too big for the scale, I couldn’t do it. I ended up discarding the newspaper, tearing up the orange paint on the seat in the process. Nowadays I’d just get Maddie to shrink and shrink and shrink (as she’d said) the print, as she did my wedding photo.
Several things were off in the Guzman/Hawkes case. Puttering around on Tuesday morning before Maddie was awake, I ignored the laundry piling up and the unopened mail from Saturday and Monday and settled myself in the atrium with a notebook and pen, a cup of chamomile, and an old afghan.
It was time for a one-on-one with myself, doodling included.
Why did Gus run off to a foreign country? Well, not so foreign if he’s a citizen of France, but why would he disappear without even telling his roommates unless he’s involved in the fraud or the murder or both?
I can’t believe Nadine could drag Sofia into the van by herself. She’s a heavy woman, but not large-framed like Sofia. Chances are she had an accomplice. Or Sofia was so drugged there was no resistance. But aren’t people heavier when they’re unconscious? I guess they can’t be heavier but they can’t help, either.
And why would Nadine choose Sofia to be her fall guy? Did Sofia figure out her scheme? Unlikely. Not even Mr. Mooney, who was part of the scheme, knew exactly what was going on.
Not one of the Mary Todd residents says it was a woman they saw that night; some say one man, some two men, but no one says a woman. Of course, Mr. Mooney changed his story again, now saying it was the van driver who gave him the medication in the lobby.
Why on earth is Nadine saying she doesn’t know Gus Boudette? You’d think she’d want to spread the blame and point the finger at her accomplice or make a deal and give him up. This might not matter since we already know where he is, just not how to get him back. I’ll have to ask Skip if we can get him back if Nadine tells us something incriminating about him.
I have too many questions and I haven’t even covered who was tailing me and who slashed my tires. It’s hard to picture the ponderous Nadine in her power suit, let alone that Victorian getup she had on for the ball, bending over to slash my tires.
The one person who can clear all this up is Nadine Hawkes herself. If I can get a few minutes with her, I can simply ask her these questions—did you have help? Was it Gus? Did you try to kill Mr. Mooney? Did you follow me? Slash my tires?
That would do it. I’ll simply talk to Skip, aunt-to-nephew, about getting in to see Nadine in jail.
Back in the real world my phone was ringing—Linda, calling from work.
I’d almost forgotten her mission for the day, to give me the names on the visitors’ log for last week. My initial interest had to do with who had been in the lobby when Mr. Mooney nearly died, but while I was at it, I wanted to look at the log for last Wednesday night also.
I realized the sign-in record gave only limited information. Dolores had visited her mother late on Wednesday without passing through the reception area. How many others slipped in through the garden on a nightly basis? So if only the people with nothing to hide signed in, what good were the logs? Better than nothing, I decided.
“I’m done, Gerry,” Linda said.
“That was fast.”
“You forget I start at seven. People don’t realize what a commitment nursing is. You have to run your social life around the hours you work.”
Didn’t everyone? But I knew Linda felt more put-upon than your average worker, though no one had forced her to choose a profession that wasn’t Monday to Friday, nine to five. Now that I thought of it, my teaching day had stretched well beyond that, also.
“What time do you want to come over and look at the log?” Linda asked me.
I felt skinny arms around my waist. “Morning, Grandma,” Maddie said.
“You’re up early, sweetheart.”
“Huh?” Linda said.
“Maddie’s up,” I said to Linda. “And I think she has other plans for today. I promised to take her to a matinee of that Christmas movie.”
“I have the pages right here,” Linda teased.
I stretched the telephone cord out as far as I could and reached in the cabinet for a bowl for Maddie’s cereal. Not that she couldn’t get it herself, but I needed to feel like I was taking care of my granddaughter. “Can you read me the names?” I asked Linda.
“Are you kidding? There are a lot of them, Gerry.”
“Do you see anyone interesting on the list?”
“What does that mean?” An exasperated voice.
“Does anyone stand out? Someone who shouldn’t be there.”
Maddie had poured out her cereal and milk. She came over and stood directly in front of me. “We can go to the home,” she mouthed, supplementing her whisper with hand gestures. Her “go” was especially cute as she walked the index and middle fingers of her right hand across the palm of her left.
I covered the mouthpiece. “Really?” I whispered. “We’ll still have plenty of time to make the one o’clock show.”
She nodded in an exaggerated fashion, shaking her hair into her eyes and making a silly face. Unlike her father, Maddie always woke up in a good mood.
Lucky for me.
Maddie took her videos and a bag of cookies to the Mary Todd employee lounge. I could just imagine her “How I Spent My Christmas Vacation” essay. I wanted to stay with her this time, to make a small gesture toward togetherness, but Linda thought it was a bad idea to go over the papers in such a public place. I know she was reluctant to simply hand them over to me, even though they were copies. She didn’t want to take a chance that they’d turn up somewhere and be traced back to her. I didn’t blame her.
Linda took me instead to a small parlor in a new wing, an area that wasn’t officially open yet. “There aren’t any residents assigned to this part and sometimes we come here to really get away on break. But no one who’s working right now knows about it.”
Linda removed plastic covers from two easy chairs and we took seats next to each other. Since Linda didn’t have a lap, the pages ended up in mine.
Linda had copied the lists from the past two weeks. These were simple charts, like Carlos Guzman’s notebook, except in this case, NAME was for the signature of a visitor, not income from someone skirting the law. TIME IN, and PURPOSE
OF VISIT were the next columns, then TIME OUT for the last column.
The record was incomplete at best, with many people signing in but not out or vice versa. Not all visitors specified a purpose or named a particular resident they were visiting.
I mentioned this sloppiness (unfortunate word choice) to Linda.
“Well, it’s not the CIA, Gerry. We do a reasonable job of keeping track, but you can’t expect perfection. It depends a lot on who’s on the desk at the time, and what else she has to do.”
Point taken. I ran my finger down the first column, tracing many visitors’ names over to people I knew. Lizzie, Emma, Gertie, Mr. Mooney, Sandy Sechrest.
I picked out my own signature for class last Friday, and Jane Mooney’s for visiting her great-grandfather. Skip hadn’t signed in—detectives’ privilege, I guessed.
“Gail Musgrave is here a lot,” I said to Linda.
“She has an aunt in the care center.”
“How come I didn’t know that?” I said half aloud. I considered Gail a friend. She was part of my crafters group and I’d helped with her campaign when she ran for her seat on the city council.
Linda heard my question. “I’m not saying this is true of Gail, but lots of people like to keep it private, especially if the relative is in the care center.”
“As if it’s something to be ashamed of?”
Linda nodded, giving me a knowing glance. “I’ve been a nurse for how many years, Gerry? A lot. And I can tell you it’s all part of us not wanting to get old and incapacitated, so we don’t acknowledge that others close to us do. Not only that, some of the residents in the care center don’t accept their situation. For example, they won’t wear wristbands with info on their medications, doses, times, and so on. That’s why we have that flaky system where the new people have to use a flip chart with photos when they deliver meds.”
I was struck by Linda’s observations and insight. I knew she was a very intelligent woman, but she wasn’t given to philosophizing very often. I filed her gem of wisdom— made more serious by our stark surroundings—away for further contemplation.
Mayhem in Miniature Page 24