Mourning In Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  High schoolers and their incidents that “happened.” I didn’t look forward to the days when Maddie would be in the thick of it. I consoled myself with the fact that Richard seemed to get through those years without trauma of the magnitude Rosie had experienced. But, unlike his daughter, Richard had a steady, nearly unflappable temperament, and took virtually no risks. Good qualities in an orthopedic surgeon, I supposed.

  I remembered Rosie’s mention of an unexpected visit Barry made to her shop. “You actually did a little research about how Rosie felt about David, didn’t you? You went to her shop and tested the waters.” If I were standing, my hands would have been on my hips in a how-could-you stance.

  “I said I wasn’t proud of this. But David refused to try to manipulate Rosie. He said once was enough.”

  Big of him, I thought. “How did you happen to have David’s trophy when you bought the candy in the hotel gift shop?”

  Barry looked at me with surprise. I was sure I appeared smarter to him now than I ever had while teaching him the intricacies of literary criticism. “I was responsible for taking it from the cocktail party. You can’t imagine how valuable something like that is. I can’t believe it’s in police custody now, like any other weapon.”

  “Did you take the trophy to David in his suite?”

  “Yeah, he wanted it for the night on Friday. Then I was supposed to pick it up before the banquet on Saturday night.”

  I gave Barry a few moments to mourn his friend again. I had the idea that in his mind they were seventeen or even ten years old and that he was reliving many of their good times together.

  Not by a long shot did I have what I needed from Barry, however, and I started in on a different track. “Why didn’t you approach Larry Esterman directly?”

  “We thought about it, but he was pretty angry back then at what we pulled on Rosie. We doubted he’d take to our scheme.”

  “You keep saying ‘we,’ Barry. I assume you’re referring to Mellace Construction?”

  Barry jolted his head up. “Are we on the record here, Mrs. Porter? Because—”

  “I’m not LPPD, Barry.”

  “Close enough. I knew this was a bad idea, but, believe it or not, I want to see David’s killer caught. Very badly.”

  “Without owning up to your part in fraudulent business practices.”

  Barry took a deep breath. “That about sums it up.”

  I needed a recap. “Let me see if I have this straight. Mellace Construction, with you as its CFO, goes around finding out what other companies are going to bid for jobs and then bids lower to get the contract. That’s why you needed help from a Callahan and Savage insider like Larry Esterman.” Barry nodded and I continued. “And when that doesn’t work, you simply work a deal with people like David Bridges who are willing to cheat and give you the contract anyway. For a cut, I assume.” Another slow nod from Barry. “Is that how Mellace got the contract for the new athletic field? Because our city managers are as unscrupulous as you and your company are?”

  “That’s harsh, Mrs. Porter.”

  “So are your practices.” I had a brainstorm. “Was it you who stole my purse?”

  Barry’s head couldn’t go any lower. “I never, never would have hurt you, Mrs. Porter. Walter told me he saw you sneaking into David’s room after the murder. He figured you were with C and S and found something damaging.”

  I was probably more shocked than I should have been, given the events of the weekend. “You knocked me over and stole my purse, Barry.”

  “Can I get some tea?”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  Chapter 19

  I hurried the tea preparation because I didn’t want to lose Barry. We’d been sitting in a spot past the middle of the atrium, toward the front door, just out of range of sight from the kitchen. I hoped his attack of conscience or whatever had sent him to me wasn’t waning.

  I carried in a tray of tea and cookies (since Barry had been so cooperative thus far) and asked as I was walking, “What happened with David, Barry? Did he start to get nervous about breaking the law, so someone in your company had to get him out of the way?” The someone I had in mind was Walter Mellace, the hallway hulk, who had accosted me. My theory was taking shape—Walter thought I was from Callahan and Savage, looking for the evidence David had claimed to have to expose Mellace Construction. Why else would anyone be breaking into David’s suite?

  Barry shot down that theory almost before I’d mounted it. “No way. David was on board. There’s a big remodel of the Duns Scotus coming up. He was totally ready to do whatever it took to give us that huge contract.”

  Barry said this with pride in his voice. It was a depressing thought, that two boyhood friends who had probably shared innocent games were now proud partners in a fraudulent business scheme. Maybe that first not-so-innocent game they played with Rosie’s and Mathis’s self-confidence was the beginning of their partnership in crime.

  I shared none of that musing with Barry.

  I thought of Ben Dobson, my recent passenger. “Could someone else have had proof of the fraud and tried to get a cut of the money? Or, possibly blackmail David?”

  “I thought of that, but then why kill the person who might be cutting you in or paying you big bucks to keep quiet?”

  “Good point.”

  The way Barry gobbled up my ginger cookies, he would have given Skip a run for his money in a cookie-eating contest. “These are awesome, Mrs. Porter,” he said.

  In spite of the flattery, I intended to pursue one more avenue. “Tell me about Cheryl Mellace, Barry.”

  “There’s a piece of work, huh? I don’t know. I guess it was never really over between those two.”

  “Do you think David was calling it off and she retaliated? Or she wanted to end the relationship and they struggled, and—”

  He shook his head. “I’ve talked to her. We had breakfast this morning.” I thought of scolding Barry for his bad taste in restaurants, but I’d impressed him enough with my extrasensory abilities. “She’s devastated over this. And you probably didn’t see the side of her this weekend that everyone sees all year. Cheryl’s the one behind all the charity giving the Mellaces do.”

  “That’s not an unusual division of labor for a wealthy couple.” I wasn’t ready to give Cheryl the benefit of the doubt.

  “Well, all I know is that Cheryl loved David. I think she was planning to leave Walter in fact. But that’s one thing David and I didn’t share—our love lives.”

  I had to be sure Barry wasn’t holding out on me. “I thought men friends shared that kind of thing.”

  Barry swallowed hard. Tears escaped and ran down his cheeks. “That’s the kind of guy David was. We made a kind of game of hinting at what was going on with women in both our lives, as if my life were as full as his. But really David knew I didn’t have much along those lines, and he did, and he didn’t want to lord it over me.”

  Another dead end. According to Barry, David and Cheryl were both candidates for sainthood.

  “I think I’m out of questions,” I said.

  “I’m not.” Barry’s frown and abrupt turnaround unnerved me. “What are you going to do with what I told you, Mrs. Porter? About the business.”

  “I don’t have to do anything, Barry. The police are already working on David’s financial records, and if everything we’ve discussed has crossed my mind before tonight, it has probably crossed theirs.”

  “Believe me, David knew how to cover his tracks.” He said this again as a matter of pride in his deceased friend.

  “It’s only a matter of time, Barry. Your best bet is to go to the police and tell them what you told me. Make it easy for them so they’ll be more inclined to go easy on you.”

  Not that he deserved it.

  Barry stood and walked with me to the door. “You may be right, but I’m not ready now, if ever, to go to the police. And anything we’ve said tonight . . . well, if anyone asks me, we just chatted about old tim
es at ALHS.”

  I opened the door, and at the same moment the doors opened on a sedan parked outside my house. Three men got out. The street was quiet at this time of night, all residents’ cars safely tucked into garages. There could be only one reason for the unmarked car and its occupants.

  “You may not have to go to the police, Barry. I think they’ve come to you.”

  I was grateful that the LPPD didn’t pull out all the stops with sirens and spinning red-and-blue lights.

  Something told me that my nephew would be stopping by soon, to explain the quiet drama in front of my house, so instead of retiring my tired mind and body to my bedroom, I refilled the cookie plate and put more water on for tea.

  I sat in my chair and tried to put the new information in order. There wasn’t much that I hadn’t guessed before Barry’s visit, but I felt that I could cross Barry off my mental list of murder suspects. His affection for his lifelong friend was obvious, and he seemed as confused as I was about who might have killed David.

  Barry would be paying dearly enough for his other crimes. He hadn’t directly accused Walter Mellace of orchestrating the broadly applied scheme, but it might be another story once he was under police lights. I wondered if Walter Mellace had made contingency plans in case something like this happened.

  I thought of Larry Esterman and his stealing the records that had been left on my car seat, most likely by Ben. What could that mean? I narrowed it down to two possibilities: First that he was going to undertake his own investigation to clear his daughter, and second, that there was something on the sheet that incriminated him.

  Barry had confirmed what Rosie had told me earlier—that Larry had been perhaps more angry than Rosie about the so-called incident in Joshua Speed Woods. Could Larry have killed David after all these years? Why wait? It was possible that David’s compounding of the insult to his daughter by essentially stealing from Larry’s company might have put Larry over the edge.

  Fine, I thought, Barry is off the list and Larry is on.

  Not what you’d call progress.

  As predicted, the next face I saw through my peephole was Skip’s. I opened the door and enjoyed his smile when he heard the kettle whistling. “I hope there’s food to go with that,” he said.

  “Of course. But not before you tell me what that was all about.” I pointed in the direction of the sidewalk where LPPD plainclothesmen had been waiting for Barry Cannon.

  Skip waved one hand at me while the other took up a cookie. “Nothing new. And, I’m guessing, nothing you don’t already know. We had our guys look into the construction award records as far as they could without a warrant.” He laughed. “Sort of a Maddie approach.”

  “She’ll be thrilled to hear you call it that.”

  “I know. I get to tell her, okay? It’s not open-and-shut, but a little more digging is bound to uncover an illegal scheme to lock out Mellace’s competition. Since Barry is Mellace’s CFO, we figured he must have had a part in it.”

  “And you had a feeling he’d be here?” I called from the kitchen where I was attending to the tea.

  During the summer especially, I was thankful for a refrigerator that made ice automatically, but lately the process took on a new dimension—I wondered if some underhanded negotiations were involved in the purchase of my home refrigeration system. Had a big company ridden over a small one to get my service contract?

  As soon as this case is over, I mused, I really must pursue other interests.

  “We’ve been tailing Barry all day to see what plans he might make now that one of his partners is dead. Imagine my surprise . . . not . . . when Drew called in and said he’d tracked Barry to your house tonight.”

  “He just stopped by, honestly. I didn’t invite him. He probably thinks I called you to arrest him.”

  “Right now, we’ve just taken him in for questioning. I figure if he ended up here, he must be ready to confess.”

  I was honored that criminals preferred to bare their souls in my home instead of interview room number three at the LPPD.

  Larry Esterman’s name was on the tip of my tongue, but I hadn’t had a chance to look again at the package of e-mails Maddie had given me, and I didn’t want to put Rosie’s father in a bad light on the basis of a hunch. I considered telling Skip that the mystery of who mugged me in the Duns Scotus lobby had been solved, but I decided not to complicate matters.

  For now, I let it go and enjoyed tea and cookies with my nephew.

  I had about another half hour before I’d have to crawl into bed, no matter how warm and stuffy my bedroom was. When Skip left, I took out the e-mails. They were useless except as documentation of contract awards. Mostly boilerplate, such as pursuant to our determination and herewith we offer you. I needed the pages Maddie had given to Skip. I’d had only a glance at them in his office. On the other hand, I thought that even if they were in front of me now, I wouldn’t be able to focus. It was time to call it a day.

  I turned out all the lights on my way to my bedroom. Only then did I notice the little red light blinking on my answering machine. It was unusual that I wouldn’t have seen the light when we got home this afternoon, and even more amazing that Maddie didn’t notice it.

  Surely I could manage one more task before going to bed. I pushed the button.

  “Hi, this is Henry. Sorry we missed each other today, Gerry. Call me when you get in later if you wish.”

  Four strikes. Was there even a game that allowed that many?

  Chapter 20

  On Tuesday morning at breakfast, I had a treat for Maddie, besides the homemade strawberry preserves crafter Mabel Quinlan had distributed to the group last week.

  “How would you like to take a ride to San Francisco this afternoon and finally get a Ghirardelli sundae? I’ll pick you up at the Rutledge Center after class and we’ll drive right up.”

  Anyone listening in on our family life would have thought that our diet revolved around ice cream: chocolate malts, caramel cashew ice cream, hot fudge sundaes. They wouldn’t be far off.

  “That would be cool, Grandma. Do you have more errands to do at the hotel?”

  I ruffled her curls. “Why would you ask that?”

  I felt I was doing my duty as a good grandmother by at least starting our afternoon with the promised sundae.

  We drove directly to Ghirardelli Square and parked a few blocks away—the best we could do, even on a weekday afternoon. A shopping area at the end of a cable car line, the square offered one of the best views in the city. Using a guide we’d picked up at the Duns Scotus over the weekend, Maddie pointed out the hills of Marin County, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the maritime museum.

  For a chocolate lover, the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory, dating back to the nineteenth century, was the centerpiece of the shopping area. The entire square smelled of sweet, melting chocolate. On this warm summer day, people were lined up around the block on Larkin Street for a chance to eat an outrageously large sundae or soda in cramped quarters.

  I held our place in line while Maddie tossed a shiny penny into a fountain already full of coins, each one with a wish attached, I surmised. I never participated in such activities, even as a child. I could never isolate one wish and my parents weren’t about to have me toss in enough coins to cover them all.

  Today, I’d truly be at a loss to choose among my wishes. The list ran from a healthy, happy life for Maddie, her parents, and all my friends and relatives, to a solution to the David Bridges murder case. If there were coins left over, I’d wish for another trip to England to see Queen Mary’s dollhouse.

  We chose brownie sundaes, with enormous scoops of ice cream, chocolate sauce, and a large brownie stuck down the side of the bowl, in case the thousands of calories in the sundae weren’t enough. We immediately wrapped our brownies in napkins for later. We weren’t gluttons, after all.

  It was hard to think of much else in the presence of such delicious decadence. Sadie’s in Lincoln Point was an outstanding little sho
p, but the excitement of being in San Francisco and the refreshing, cool air by the bay made everything taste better.

  In spite of being in this legendary area, where Tony Ben-nett had left his heart, Maddie’s mind, like mine, drifted to the murder case.

  “Grandma, can we work on the information I downloaded about those contracts and things?”

  I stirred errant crumbs from the brownie into my ice cream. “We should put brownie crumbs on the counter in the Bronx house,” I said.

  “Grandma?”

  “I’d love to work on that information, but you gave the printout to Uncle Skip, remember?” So there.

  Maddie reached into her backpack. “I have copies,” she said, with a chocolate-rimmed grin.

  “I should have known.”

  “If you had the e-mails I gave you, we could work on everything right now,” she said.

  My turn. I reached down into my tote, on the floor by my feet. “I brought the e-mails with me.”

  “I should have known,” she said.

  I wondered if anyone could have been as proud of a grandchild as I was at that moment.

  We both wanted to work on the contract documents on the spot, but one look at our tiny marble-topped table, and another at the long line of customers waiting for their turn at overdosing on chocolate, and we knew that was a bad idea.

  “What about the hotel lobby?” I said. “You don’t have to be staying there to walk in and use the coffee tables and chairs. It will be as if we’re still registered,” I said.

  Maddie gave me a sideways look. “You’re not going to dump me in the pool, are you?”

  Between bouts of laughter, I made a promise to keep Maddie dry, and she accepted.

  I couldn’t remember ever being so full as I was driving back toward downtown San Francisco.