Murder In Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  I could believe that marriage to Walter Mellace would be a strong motivation to at least appear to be a faithful wife. Thinking of Cheryl’s eye patch-which might have come from a visit to her ophthalmologist, I realized-I wondered again if Mrs. Mellace had failed to pass the fidelity test.

  Rosie had come to a halt, her eyes tearing up again. I tried to ignore it. Empathy would get us nowhere. I prodded. “And then?”

  “Okay, you know where the ice and the vending machines are in the little alcove by the elevators?”

  “You hid there?”

  Full-out tears now as Rosie nodded. “I wanted to wait until Cheryl left. I had the thought that if I showed David the locker room, it might, you know, soften him and make him remember our first kiss and all.”

  “You came into the room while Maddie and I were sleeping?”

  She nodded and dabbed her face again. “Uh-huh. I forgot to tell you, I stopped in our room first. The room box was right on the corner of the dresser near the door, so I just slipped in and got it. I knew you wouldn’t have chained the door and locked me out.”

  I had a hard time processing that Rosie had come and gone while we were sound asleep, but she had no reason to lie about that.

  “Then?” I prodded.

  “I went to the eleventh floor. It was almost one in the morning. I was so stupid, Gerry. My legs were cramped and every time someone came for ice, for real I had to pretend I was getting some ice myself, or a soda, or tossing a bag of trash. I hid the room box behind the big drink machine. One guy must have come in three times while I was there. Who knows what he thought. And Barry Cannon came in. He was in the room right across the hall from David’s. He… oh, never mind what he said.”

  “Rosie, I’m so sorry you had to go through all this.”

  “I thought, you know, maybe the reunion had reawakened feelings in David, and if I had a chance to talk to him alone and show him the lockers…” She shook her head, as if trying to get rid of silly dreams. “I can’t believe I was such a fool.”

  “It’s not going to do any good to think that way, Rosie. We need to go on and cover the rest of your night.”

  “Here’s the worst part.” Uh-oh. Did I want to hear this? “Cheryl came out for ice, right when I’d taken the room box out from its hiding place, to make sure it hadn’t gotten too dirty behind those machines. She was wearing a robe, one of those thick white hotel robes. I didn’t want to think about why. She laughed her head off, Gerry. She knew right away why I was there. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. She called me pitiful, and she was right.”

  Once again, I couldn’t disagree, so I simply uttered a sound between a cough and a grunt.

  Rosie wasn’t finished reliving the traumatic episode. “Cheryl grabbed the room box from my hands. Roughly, Gerry. She started to pull at the pieces, but you know how carefully I attach everything. She was getting frustrated and finally she was strong enough to deflate that football I made out of leather.”

  Linda came back with another pitcher of ice tea and lemonade, just in time to hear Rosie finish her story.

  “I was so mad I hauled off and hit her in the face with my purse. I didn’t even care that the scene fell to the floor.”

  Linda stopped in her tracks. “I guess I missed a lot.” An eye patch zoomed into focus on the white wall of the Mary Todd guest room. “Did you injure her?”

  “She was bleeding, from her forehead, I think. I guess the heavy rhinestone buckle on my purse caught her in the wrong place. She started to scream, but we couldn’t exactly yell at each other in the middle of the night in the hotel hallway. She just whispered something very crude and ran back to David’s room.”

  “And you?”

  “I waited… not long… and finally decided it was no use. The great David Bridges didn’t care about me thirty years ago, and he never would.”

  “The room box?”

  “I just picked it up and took it back to our room. Some things were broken, but I didn’t care.”

  Rosie seemed to collapse on the straight-back chair, as if she had just entered room five sixty-eight at the Duns Scotus and flopped on the bed next to me.

  Was this the point where an LPPD interrogator would apply further pressure, taking advantage of her exhausted state?

  I had question after question on the tip of my tongue. If she never entered David’s room, how did she explain the presence of the tiny oval mirror from the door of the locker? And what was the meaning of the trashed room box? Although Skip hadn’t told me where or how the police had found the piece, I knew the ugly changes-the graffiti and the bottle of poison-were certainly made by the hand of a miniaturist. I could simply ask Rosie where she thought the scene was now, but my mind was in a spin trying to figure out what to settle first.

  I was eager to know if Rosie was aware that it had been Barry Cannon who sent her the chocolates, and probably all of the other presents, and not David. If so, did that make her angry? How angry?

  A cop would know the right order to pursue these questions.

  “Rosie, you need to talk to the police,” I said, not for the first time since I’d entered the room.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Here’s where I should deny the suspect water or a chance to visit the bathroom. I looked at my friend, ragged and vulnerable, and threw back my shoulders.

  “Let’s take a break,” I said. “Have some more ice tea, Rosie.”

  When Maddie’s call came in on my cell phone, I was alone in the tiny bedroom. Rosie was in the bathroom; Linda was back on the floor, as she termed it, with patients.

  “Where are you, Grandma?” Maddie asked.

  “I-”

  “No, wait. Let me guess. You’re doing er-r-r-rrands.”

  I smiled at the way she stretched out the word, rolling the r’s as if she were practicing a romance language. I couldn’t deny my overuse of the word, whenever I was looking into matters I thought too risky for Maddie’s involvement.

  “Are you having a good time with Aunt Beverly?”

  “Uh-huh. And with Uncle Nick.”

  Nice for all. I was just getting used to Nick’s being part of the family. Beverly had met him in her work as a civilian volunteer for the LPPD and they now seemed to be inseparable. She’d been a widow much longer than I had, since Skip was only eleven years old. On days when I wasn’t completely selfish, I was happy for her.

  “And Uncle Skip is here,” Maddie said.

  Not so nice. I had a reaction similar to the one I’d have if I were cruising down the 101 and saw the black-and-white California Highway Patrol car in my rearview mirror, even if I wasn’t exceeding sixty-five miles an hour.

  “How’s the pool?” I asked Maddie.

  Maddie laughed. “No stalling around, Grandma. Uncle Skip wants to talk to you.”

  The odds seemed stacked against me. My Nancy Drew granddaughter, my homicide detective nephew, and retired homicide detective Nick Marcus were all at the other end of the phone line. Not a line, exactly, since it was cell phone to cell phone. Maybe an electric wave of some kind.

  In any case, this time I was speeding.

  Chapter 11

  In the approximately ten seconds it took for Skip to assume control of the phone at Beverly’s house, I ran through my options for truth or consequences. What if he asked whether I knew where Rosie was? How could I get around that? I could use his technique and ask another question. I could-

  “Is Rosie Norman with you?” Skip asked, without prelude.

  I swallowed hard. Then, aha! I heard water running in the bathroom, behind a closed door. “No,” I said, with the ease of the just.

  “If you find her, will you advise her to come in immediately?”

  “Of course,” I said with great confidence. No lies so far. If he’d phrased his question as “Do you know where she is?” I’d have been stuck. I couldn’t believe my luck. And it was my turn
. “Is Rosie a fugitive from justice?”

  “Technically, no.”

  Whew. I was home free. “When can I talk to you?”

  “Besides right now on the phone?”

  “Yes.” (Because the water had stopped running and technically, I would be with Rosie in about one minute.)

  “I’ll meet you at my office in ten,” he said.

  “How about twenty? And, Skip, can you leave-”

  “Without the redheaded squirt.”

  “You mean the other redheaded squirt.”

  I was glad we were a close family.

  I knew the LPPD would be looking to make an arrest soon, partly to give David’s family some comfort as the time for his memorial approached. The sooner Rosie talked to them, the better.

  My strategy with Rosie hadn’t worked so far; I had to try a new tack that I hoped wouldn’t upset Linda even more than she was already. Maddie’s term “freaked out” came to mind, and I had to say, though I admired and taught proper English, that some of my granddaughter’s current favorite expressions had more impact than the classics.

  “Rosie, you know Linda’s job is on the line here, if not worse.” I didn’t mention that I was prepared to take the full blame, telling whoever needed to know that I’d forced Linda into this position, on threat of… something. I’d work it out.

  As I feared, Linda gasped. She had a habit in times like this of grabbing the front of her uniform, already stretched across her full bosom, as if she were having a heart attack. Before she lost her composure completely, I told her that I had it on good authority that, technically, she was not harboring a fugitive.

  “But you might be one soon, Rosie. The longer you put this off, the more guilty you look. I’m going downtown to talk to Skip, to clear the way for you, but you have to promise me that you’ll go to the station and talk to him before the day is over.”

  Rosie nodded, her sad eyes drooping.

  “Now, I have only a few minutes to clear up some things.” I dug in my tote and fished out the tiny mirror, which I’d wrapped in tissue, having thought of preserving fingerprints only after it was too late. “No beating around the bush, Rosie. I found this in David’s room on Saturday afternoon.”

  Rosie took the mirror between her thumb and index finger. Neither she nor Linda asked what I’d been doing in the murdered man’s hotel suite. Apparently my friends took my investigative privileges for granted. Rosie peered closely at the mirror. The shiny gold edge seemed to blink on and off as it caught the late afternoon sun, now directly, now through a waving tree branch. She squinted, missing her magnifier, I was sure. I had one in my tote but decided against offering it to her. Either Rosie knew where the mirror had come from or she didn’t. It didn’t take close scrutiny for her to figure it out.

  Rosie looked confused. “It looks like one from the set I used in my room box, for the locker doors. But I swear I don’t know how this mirror got in David’s room, Gerry. I was never in there, just at the doorway, with you.”

  And lurking in the hallway, I added, but not out loud. “You did take the scene to the hallway while you were waiting, though.”

  “I told you, I thought it might take him back to high school, to those old hallway lockers, in a good way. Remember I told you how it was in front of the lockers when he kissed me and asked me out that one time? But, I never got to show it to him on Friday night.” She looked at the mirror again, as if in wonder. “The only time I actually laid eyes on David that night I was with you. Where would I have put the room box then? I had that tiny evening purse.”

  “With a big buckle,” Linda said, reminding us she was there, with a slightly wrong-time, wrong-place joke. She cupped her hand over her mouth. Linda couldn’t know how relieved I was that she wasn’t still gasping in terror over the possibility of being arrested herself for her Good Samaritan gesture.

  “One more thing, Rosie.” I took my time describing how the scene was trashed. I wrote out the words in the air between us: I hate David. I could tell from Rosie’s expression that she herself was the vandal. “Remember, no skirting the truth,” I reminded her.

  “I trashed it. I was so angry, Gerry. I was in our room after you and Maddie left on Saturday morning. I’d shoved it in a drawer the night before. It was already broken in a lot of places. Everything was loose. I started to put the scene back into its carrier while I was packing up and I went nuts. I shaved a point on my lipstick and used it to write that graffiti and then I had this thought of making a bottle of poison. That part calmed me down in a strange way.”

  It was not a pretty sight-Rosie madly writing her hate message on the miniature lockers, then, with great concentration, gathering materials from hotel supplies and fashioning the tiny bottle.

  “Then you-what?-threw it away?” I was still trying to figure out how the police got hold of it. Rosie blew her nose and nodded at the same time. “I was on my way out and I started to feel so angry again. I just shoved it in the wastebasket in the room. Who needed it? I’m surprised it survived at all.”

  “Good glue comes through again, huh?” I said, wondering at what point the police got hold of it.

  A brief, thin, but welcome smile crept over Rosie’s face at my glue comment.

  ***

  Linda kept extra clothes in her locker at the Mary Todd, a storage place much more elegant than the rusted old gray ones that ALHS provided its students. Rosie was invited to borrow any of Linda’s pants and shirts, and she started to clean herself up. The easiest logistics would have been for Rosie to show up at the police station soon after I’d had a chance to talk to Skip.

  “If you leave here an hour after I do, that should do it,” I said.

  “Don’t let me go alone, Gerry,” Rosie said, reminding me of her plea before heading for David’s fictitious private party. “I’m not sure I’d be able to get there.”

  This time I held firm. I needed to reclaim my family life and spend some time with Maddie and Beverly. (Oh, and Nick.)

  “I’d rather not come all the way back here to get you. It might be good if you drive your own car to the station,” I said, thinking, It’s the grown-up thing to do.

  Rosie didn’t look happy about that arrangement but before she could speak, Linda rescued her. “I’ll take her,” she said.

  Usually moody and often disgruntled, Linda came through big-time when anyone appeared ill or needing help. I learned that firsthand when she dropped all extraneous life tasks and helped me care for Ken during the last weeks of his life.

  I gave Linda a smile that she probably thought was for only her present kindnesses.

  I had one more question for Rosie, a speciously easy one. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your dad,” I said. “How’s he taking this?”

  “I haven’t talked to him. Isn’t that awful. But he never liked David back then because of, you know, the date.”

  “The date gone bad.” I had no idea exactly what had gone wrong but now was not the time to ask.

  Rosie took a seat on the bed. She had a pair of Linda’s elastic waist pants in her hands. If she tried to hang her head any lower, she’d have swept the floor with her hair. “Uh-huh.”

  “Your dad still works, I understand. For Callahan and Savage?” Just evaluating Henry Baker as a possible future source of information.

  “He consults for them, mostly. He prepares bids, things like that.”

  “Why are you asking about him now?” Linda asked. I knew she meant “on my time.”

  I patted Rosie’s head. “I’m just trying to get Rosie back to normal and remind her that many people love her.”

  Not bad for a quick cover story.

  Linda walked me to the front door, leaving Rosie to finish dressing in her clothes. Once we entered the main wing of the home, we ran into a few people I knew, mostly seniors who were enrolled in my crafts classes. We got away with a quick wave at Emma and Lizzie, veritable twins they were such close friends, and one of the best woodworkers I’d ever met, Mr.
Mooney.

  Seeing the old man in his trim cardigan reminded me of Henry, my newest woodworker friend. I found myself planning a way to initiate another visit to his shop. So that I could see the apartment complex he’d built for his granddaughter, and so that Maddie and Taylor could play together. There was also that unresolved computer joke begun at brunch this morning in San Francisco: why did the witch need a computer? I was eager for the punch line.

  Those were the only reasons I could think of for contacting Henry Baker.

  “I have news from the front,” Linda said, sounding like a war correspondent from the forties. “I was chatting around while I was on the floor and found out the memorial service for David will be next Saturday at St. Bridget’s. Kind of funny, huh? I mean Bridges and Bridget?” Linda’s nervous laugh trailed off for lack of company. “What is it with me today, Gerry? You know me, I never make this kind of joke.”

  “We’re all a little off this weekend,” I said.

  “But there’s more,” Linda said. “His classmates have decided to have a memorial service tomorrow morning so people who came from a distance would have a chance to participate. They won’t have the… uh… deceased, of course, but his friends will be able to say good-bye. The announcement made the local news.”

  “It sounds like something not to be missed.”

  Linda put her hand on my shoulder to slow me down to her walking pace. “I’m not through. I heard that the Mellaces-really Cheryl, because Walter didn’t go to ALHS-are paying for everything.”

  “Nice of them.”

  “Plus they’re making a second donation to the new athletic field for a special plaque with David’s name.”

  Linda had truly become the eyes and ears of the world.