Malice in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  June stopped on her way to my trash compactor. “I didn’t bail her out.”

  Zoe fumbled a glass (not paper) she was holding. “You didn’t?”

  “You thought I did?” June asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No. You called me and I went to pick you up,” June said.

  “Yeah, and I assumed you’d posted my bail.”

  “I assumed you’d posted it.”

  And I assumed that whoever posted it was not yet through with Zoe Howard.

  I walked toward the living room, calling as I went. “Skip!”

  While Skip left messages with all his contacts to determine who’d posted Zoe’s bail, we all speculated, unhampered by a lack of facts.

  “Maybe Rhonda posted it so she could attack you, Zoe, and instead she got attacked.” This from Mary Lou, who did a nice job of suggesting that if Zoe had attacked Rhonda in self-defense, this was the perfect time to confess.

  The rest of us had more general questions. Skip had already told Zoe she had no chance of finding out herself on a Sunday night. She’d have to wait until morning.

  “How come a person can walk in and post bail on a Sunday but you can’t find out who it was on a Sunday?” I asked.

  “You can always post bail at the jail, twenty-four/seven. But that doesn’t mean the paperwork will be done and available,” Skip said.

  “Who could it have been?” was heard in many variations, as well as, “How much was it for?” and “Can anyone just walk in and post bail for someone without telling them?”

  “Is that information available to the public?” Richard asked. “Or is it like a medical record?”

  “It’s a gray area,” Skip said. “The press has a right to know but not necessarily a need to know. Whether the public has any rights in this regard is up in the air. There’s nothing on the books and it’s never been tested in Lincoln Point.”

  For some reason, my nephew gave me a look that said, “Don’t you start.”

  Maddie left the room and came back with a printout of information on bail. We let her read some of it out loud.

  “ ‘You must be eighteen years old to post bail,’ ” she read, adding, “And you need an ID so I guess I can’t do it yet.” (I hoped she’d never have to.) She continued reading (at a very high level, I might add). “ ‘If a defendant has no ties to the community where he has committed his crimes, or for any other reason, a judge can order that he be held without bail.’ Hmmm. Judges are, like, in charge of a lot.”

  “Maybe you’d like to be a judge,” Skip said to Maddie. “Stephen Douglas was a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court.”

  Either June had been tutoring Skip on Illinois history, or he really was into the spirit of debate season more than I remembered from previous years.

  “Never mind,” said Mary Lou, who, while law-abiding, couldn’t quite let go of her antiestablishment roots.

  Maddie wisely kept silent on the topic.

  Skip’s cell phone ring stopped all threads of conversation. If he wanted privacy, he was in the wrong house. We sat poised to listen and learn from his side of the call, but Skip was practiced in the art of the noncommittal.

  “Yeah?” Pause. “Can you spell that?” Pause. “A two-for, huh? I really appreciate this, Jenny. I’ll be right there.”

  I detected a slight twitching of June’s eyebrows at the mention of a “Jenny.”

  Skip clicked off and smiled, playing his audience for all it was worth. It was the “two-for” reference that stuck in mind, and I intended to hold out for two pieces of news.

  “The bail poster was a woman named Debra Ketough,” he said, spelling it for us. “Now, I gotta go.” He grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair.

  “Who?” Zoe said.

  “Oh, no. You can’t go without telling us the second thing,” I said.

  “Who’s that?” Mary Lou asked.

  “I have no idea,” Zoe said.

  “Some stranger bailed you out?” June asked.

  “Who said there was a second thing?” Skip asked me, zipping his all-weather jacket.

  “Ketough. That’s an unusual name,” Mary Lou said, wiping off the end tables we’d used for our buffet. “Definitely not one of the ten people I know in Lincoln Point, all of whom are artists.”

  “I heard you say ‘two-for’,” I said. “Is Rhonda awake? Is that it?”

  “I can Google her,” Maddie said. She picked up a pencil and smoothed out one of the sheets she’d printed out with bail bond information. “Debra . . . can you spell it for me again?” I leaned over and wrote it down for her, then watched her disappear down the hallway.

  “Who could she be?” Zoe asked. “I never heard of a Debra Ketough or Keting or whatever.” She sounded flustered, as I would be if a stranger had had that much influence over my life at a critical stage. I’m sure she considered, as I did, that this Debra could be the killer.

  Richard, who had the least amount of tolerance for this kind of uncontrolled scattered interchange, had turned away and put the television set on at very low volume. He’d found a channel showing the history of the typewriter.

  “I never heard of a Debra Ketough,” Zoe said.

  “Well, that’s what they told me,” Skip said. “Is she from Chicago, maybe?”

  “Someone you work with?” I asked. A fairly useless thought, since no matter how low the bail was, I couldn’t imagine a casual work friend posting it, especially without creating some fanfare and informing the beneficiary.

  Richard focused intently on the television screen. I saw a close-up of the row of number keys at the top of an old-fashioned black typewriter.

  Ken and I always marveled at the concentration and interest Richard would show for the most obscure documentaries. The secret life of the American bison. A biography of a one-hundred-year-old African American woman who never left her West Virginia home. The evolution of the Barbie doll.

  Today, I understood that he needed to distance himself from a situation he had no control over.

  “I’m going to ride to the hospital with you,” I said to Skip.

  “Me, too, me, too,” said the shortest one in our midst, just back from her research mission.

  “It’s bedtime for you, sweetie,” Mary Lou said, poking Maddie in a playful way.

  “And we need you to stay and work with June and Zoe to find out who this Debra is,” I said.

  “I tried. I couldn’t find her. It’s like she doesn’t have an address anywhere, not in the whole state of California. Then I broadened my search and still couldn’t find her. She must be from another country.”

  “Thanks for all the work,” Skip said, ruffling her hair. I wondered how long he could get away with that. Longer than either her parents or I could, I was sure.

  “So can I come to the hospital?”

  I leaned over and whispered in Maddie’s ear. “I’ll tell you everything when I tuck you in.”

  Maddie thrust her chin out. “Okay, okay.”

  “Who said anyone is coming with me?” Skip asked.

  “I just need five minutes with her,” I said.

  “Suppose I call you in a half hour or so and let you know what’s up.”

  I thrust my chin out, then realized that if it hadn’t worked for an eleven-year-old, it probably wouldn’t work for me. “Okay,” I said.

  Skip looked at June. “I’ll see you later?”

  She gave him a wonderful smile and a shy nod.

  All was well again, I thought, until I caught Zoe’s expression. She’d done very well at dinner and through the rest of the evening, with neither temper tantrums nor tears. Maybe that’s why I felt so sorry for her. Now her lips quivered and her eyes were watery. She seemed to be barely holding it together, ready to go to one extreme or the other at the slightest nudge.

  I knew what that was like.

  My guests trickled out. It was as if, once Skip left, the party was over.

  Zoe had tried to determine more about the woman who b
ailed her out, but as Skip had predicted, she couldn’t get through to anyone at the courthouse or the jail. Frustrated, she left with June, planning to stay next door overnight. I didn’t blame her. Under the circumstances, being bailed out wasn’t necessarily a plus and I wouldn’t have wanted to go home to an empty condo, either.

  At some point in the evening, Zoe had learned about the slashed fruit at my home and at her neighbor’s. (Richard had let it slip, thinking it was common knowledge.) That might also have contributed to Zoe’s decision to stay where, unbeknownst to her or June, there had been a stabbed raccoon.

  Chapter 21

  Maddie and I left her father with a glass of wine, watching a program on the history of surgical instruments (this one was understandably interesting), and her mother with a cup of tea, at her desk catching up with correspondence for her Palo Alto art gallery.

  “There is life for an artist after the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you know,” she’d reminded us. “I have to prepare a mailing for our spring exhibit.”

  Maddie and I went to the room with the baseball afghan for our good-night session. I was hoping for an interruption by way of a phone call from Skip summoning me to Rhonda’s bedside, but quiet time with my granddaughter was not a bad second choice.

  “If someone is not a nice person, does that mean he deserves to be killed?” Maddie asked me.

  “No, of course not. You know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but this artist was very mean to people.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I saw a video on YouTube. It showed Brad Goodman getting an award and he practically pushed that nice Mr. Villard out of the way.”

  “Mr. Villard? From the Rutledge Center?”

  “Uh-huh. The man with the beard.” Maddie was fading off to sleep. “I saw the TV lady on the video, too.”

  My eyes widened. The TV lady? We knew only one TV lady, Nan Browne. What was Nan Browne doing on a video with Ed Villard and Brad Goodman?

  Ordinarily I wouldn’t dream of trying to keep Maddie awake beyond her first yawn. But tonight I was merciless. I propped her up a bit from her supine position.

  “Let’s talk a little more about the video, sweetheart. You saw Ms. Browne with the artist who was killed? And Mr. Villard was there, too?”

  “Uh-huh.” Maddie slid down on threadbare soccer-design sheets (another of her father’s legacies), yawning more deeply, eyes blinking. “You can see some of the Google images in the album I made for Zoe. And you can see Mr. Villard in the newspaper photos I cut out.”

  I detected a slight slurring of Maddie’s esses. Why had she picked tonight to want to go to bed at a reasonable hour? I felt I was a candidate for the world’s worst grandmother—leading my granddaughter into a crime scene, forgetting to pick her up at school, and now keeping her awake like some fourth-world minister of torture.

  “Just a couple more minutes, sweetheart.”

  “I left out a lot of stuff that wasn’t nice, though,” Maddie said.

  I wished I had Zoe’s photo album. There had been too much going on at the hospital and then in the kitchen (even paper plates generated housekeeping chores) and living room at the time. I’d given the album only a cursory look, paying more attention to Maddie’s crafts work than to the content. And now the book was next door, with Zoe and June.

  I went to the bedroom window to see if there were still lights on in June’s house. It was only nine thirty, after all. Maddie’s room was in the southeast corner of my property, however, and June’s house was set back a little to the north, so I couldn’t tell if anyone was up.

  “Can you find those pictures again?” I asked Maddie, now almost asleep.

  “Uh-huh. Tomorrow, okay?”

  “It’s very important.”

  Was I really going to do this?

  What kind of grandmother pulls a little girl out of bed (at least it wasn’t a school night), sits her in front of a computer, and puts her to work?

  My kind.

  Maddie valiantly woke herself up enough to show me how to go back to the Internet sites she’d visited. I was sure that little word from me about how this was going to help Uncle Skip was a great motivator. I draped a small daisy-chain quilt I’d made years ago over her shoulders. I wasn’t entirely a monster, I told myself.

  Maddie made bookmarks of the key places she’d used in her search, not only this evening but throughout the week, when we thought she was in here simply e-mailing all her old friends in Los Angeles. I watched her manipulate the mouse and keyboard, suppressing pangs of guilt until I felt I could manage on my own.

  “You should get back into bed,” I told her finally, half lifting her from the chair.

  Her look of relief almost brought me to tears.

  “You can stay in my room and work, Grandma. The computer doesn’t make any noise.” (I knew that much.)

  “I promise I won’t be very long, and I’ll be very quiet.”

  This whole interchange seemed backward to me. Shouldn’t my granddaughter be saying those things to me, and not vice versa?

  “And don’t worry, Grandma. You can’t break anything.” (I was relieved to hear this.) “If you need me, just wake me up, okay?”

  I gave Maddie a hug. “Thank you so much, sweetheart. You’ll get a special treat tomorrow, okay?”

  “Mmm,” she managed.

  When she didn’t take this opportunity to make a deal, I knew she must be exhausted. I tucked her in, propped a pillow on the side of her bed to block the light from the monitor, and went back to her computer.

  I pecked away at the keyboard, each click sounding like the clash of cymbals in the otherwise quiet room. I looked over a few times to where Maddie was sleeping a few feet away. Never a stir, so I kept going.

  A page (did they call them pages when some of them went on and on?) came up of still photos of Brad Goodman—headshots, such as an actor might use. I knew Mary Lou had similar professional portraits of herself for art show brochures and other gallery publicity.

  I got discouraged at seeing page after page of benign photographs and figured these were the ones Maddie had copied for Zoe’s album.

  I switched to the newspaper sites and had better luck. If finding juicy tidbits about a murder victim could be called luck. An article from an art newsletter produced in Santa Fe had the headline “Art Incident Delays Show.” I read the opening paragraph.

  Up-and-coming artist Bradford Goodman filed a petition to the art commission today to exclude veteran artist Edward Villard from next week’s Grand Illusions art show. Goodman claims that Villard submitted the same painting to a previous show, in violation of the current rules. Judges claim they need more time to investigate the accusation.

  The article, about eighteen months old, was one of many on the topic through the next few days. I scanned them all, getting few other details of the story. By the end of the week, the allegations had proved false (“Mr. Goodman apologizes profusely, regretting that he received incorrect information about the talented Mr. Villard”), but the notice exonerating Ed of misconduct got about one tenth the column space that the original story had gotten.

  I made a note to have Maddie print out copies for me in the morning, since my printer was noisy and I didn’t know how to access hers.

  Buoyed by my new proficiency with the Internet, I followed a cheat sheet Maddie had prepared for me and accessed YouTube. I felt I’d shed a couple of decades and could now call myself “cool.”

  The video was very brief, not more than four minutes. It captured another show, this one in a gallery in Carmel, not too far from Lincoln Point (in miles, that is, not in charm, where the oceanside town of Carmel had it all over LP).

  I watched a slightly jerky recording of Brad Goodman at an awards reception. Maddie hadn’t been exaggerating. Brad, holding an award in the shape of a large palette, as near as I could tell, pushed Ed away from the center of the camera’s focus and waved his trophy in the air. Not that I was an expert in kinesics, but the
motion made him look more like a sports figure than a fine artist. Ed stepped awkwardly off the platform in what I was sure was an embarrassing moment for him.

  I played the video again, this time looking at people in the background, in case this was where Maddie had seen Nan Browne.

  The second time through, I saw Ed lumber off to the right side of the screen with a nasty expression on his face. The third time through I picked Nan Browne and her daughter out of the crowd just behind the platform on the left. Diana was holding a trophy of some kind also, smaller than Brad’s. Second place? Diana looked happy, but her mother had an expression similar to Ed’s and I suspected she also had a problem with Brad’s winning.

  I sat back in the desk chair, trying to recall my interactions with Ed Villard and Nan Browne. I was sure both of them had said they hadn’t known Brad before he came to Lincoln point less than a year ago. Why would they hide such an innocuous relationship? Testy, yes, but still innocuous.

  I knew the LPPD had interviewed all the artists who worked at Rutledge. Skip had said everyone had “alibied out.” Since Brad’s body had been found in the Channel 29 studio, I assumed their staff, including Nan Browne, would have been on the list as well. I wondered if “stars” like Nan needed as good an alibi as the common folk. I made a note to ask Skip what had come of his interview with her.

  I decided to push my limits at the computer and try to find out who Debra Ketough was. I started by putting her name into Google. “I’m Googling,” I said to myself, amazed at how I’d fallen in line not only with methods of research beyond 3-by-5 index cards, but with the new verbs computers had invented.

  It took more than learning the jargon, however, and I had no luck finding Debra. What made me think I could do better at this than my granddaughter? Maddie was right. It was as though Debra Ketough didn’t have an address, at least not one easily found. I quit before I was tempted to sign up for a paid subscription to a company that promised to find all my high school classmates.