Missing Mark

by Julie Kramer

  was curled up at home on my couch, reading the melancholy “Fall of the House of Usher,” when Madeline knocked on my door. I was at the part where the narrator begins to feel that he, too, is going mad.

  She could see me through the window, so while it was too late for me to pretend not to be home, I was determined not to let her cross my threshold.

  I greeted her with some pleasantries about always being delighted to see her. “Let’s go for a walk, Madeline. The weather’s gorgeous.”

  Actually the sky was cloudy, the air damp.

  “No, I’m cold,” she said. “Let’s stay in.”

  “I’ll grab you a coat.” I also grabbed Gracie to join us. By then I’d cleaned off Chad’s blood and hair.

  “What’s that?” Madeline pointed to the award clutched in my hand.

  “It’s a weight I like to use when I’m out walking. I switch it from hand to hand to build muscle.” I demonstrated for her.

  “It’s very unusual. May I see it?” She reached for my Gracie. By then we were on the path by the lake and other people were out and about, raking their yards and clearing the shoreline. With an abundance of witnesses, I handed my trophy over, but made sure not to turn my back on my walking companion.

  “How striking,” she said. “It’s shaped in the abstract form of a woman.” She swung it back and forth like I’d shown her. “Where did you get it? I’d like to buy two, one for each arm.”

  I mumbled something about it being a gift and switched the topic back to the weather. We walked for about a quarter of a mile before she asked if I thought the police would ever solve Mark’s murder.

  “I don’t know, Madeline. Each case is different.”

  Before I always figured she was seeking reassurance that her case was important; now I wondered if she was really seeking information that she was reluctant to ask the police herself. I watched her face as I spoke, looking for clues. I couldn’t come right out and ask to borrow her opal brooch, knowing she’d lost it. That would give everything away. Besides, she was still holding Gracie and I was unarmed.

  “That the same gun was used in both murders makes some elements simpler and others more complicated,” I said.

  “What kinds of steps do you think authorities are taking in the investigation?” she asked. A natural enough question unless what she really meant was, How best can I continue to cover my tracks?

  Evasion would only make her suspicious. So I reviewed Detective Bradshaw’s drug money theory with her. I expected Madeline to embrace that idea enthusiastically to divert attention from herself; instead she nixed it.

  “But, Madeline, you didn’t know Mark all that long or all that well. There’s lots you might not know about him.”

  “I knew him well enough.” Well, maybe she did. Maybe that’s why she killed him. Maybe she knew he was a heel.

  “Did you know he had a baby?” I wasn’t going to tell her about baby Sven, but it just sort of slipped out because she sounded so smug about knowing her man.

  Madeline stopped walking; Gracie slipped from her fingers and fell to the ground. Her thud left a depression in the dirt. I picked her up and wiped her off, glad to have her back in my hands.

  “Tell me about this baby,” Madeline said.

  I kept the details sketchy. I didn’t want to put Sigourney or her son in any danger. Jean Lefevre’s murder still bothered me.

  Madeline Post was steamed. She didn’t say anything, but her gait was stiff and angry. We continued our walk past some boat slips to an old white gazebo in Matoska Park. She climbed up the steps, I followed, and we sat on a bench looking out over the lake. Madeline reached over, took Gracie from me, fidgeting nervously with her.

  I found myself wondering if a sociopath could be created if she couldn’t bond with anyone because everyone looked the same. I reminded myself to check back with Professor Vasilis for his take on that chilling hypothesis. From a layman’s perspective, pulling a trigger might be easier, certainly less personal, if the victim was a blur instead of an individual. But if Mark’s face was so very special to Madeline, that argument might make it even more difficult for her to kill him— unless she feared losing him anyway.

  “Riley, do the police know about the child?” She startled me with her question.

  “They investigated the mother as a possible suspect and appear to have eliminated her based on an alibi.”

  “That comedian had an alibi, too. Didn’t he?”

  “Alibis are the cornerstone of a homicide investigation. That and circumstantial evidence. Cops look at alibis for everyone connected to the victims.”

  Just then I got an idea of where to take this conversation for answers without making it confrontational.

  “They might even ask you for an alibi, Madeline. I remember when we first met we talked about where you were after the rehearsal dinner, but run me through it again. How would you account for your whereabouts that night for the police?”

  She paused before answering, as if thinking back to the night before her almost-wedding. “You mean my last normal night.”

  Madeline, Mark, her mother, and brother all had separate vehicles at the rehearsal dinner because they were coming from different directions and because three out of the four were too rich to worry about gas pushing four bucks a gallon.

  I stopped her just then to clarify that Mark’s car had never been found. Minneapolis police told me there’d been no traffic stops since his disappearance. And I figured Detective Bradshaw would have mentioned if the black Jeep had surfaced.

  Madeline practiced her alibi by explaining that Vivian wanted her daughter to spend her last unmarried night back home at the Peninsula House. Her designer wedding gown was already there, waiting for her to slip it on the next morning.

  But Madeline didn’t go straight to the Post estate after the rehearsal dinner. She stopped at her condo first to water some plants and pack a few things, before driving out to the Peninsula House an hour or so later.

  I swallowed as I did the math in my mind.

  Madeline explained that Libby Melrose, her maid of honor, came over afterward and they giggled over old yearbooks for an hour or so. Then Libby left and Madeline fell asleep in her old bedroom. She woke up around seven, had a light breakfast with her mother while Roderick slept in. Then she began a flurry of appointments with a hairdresser, makeup artist, and other wedding professionals hired to come to the house.

  She stopped talking and looked up as if daring me to challenge her litany.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. But what I was really thinking was, Yep, Madeline had time to kill.

  Something in my countenance must have given me away. Unfortunately, despite being profoundly face blind, Madeline could read body language and voice inflection, because suddenly she blurted out, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I never said that,” I replied.

  “But you were thinking it, weren’t you? You think it’s me. You think I killed Mark.”

  First she looked shocked, then angry. And if looks were enough to kill, I’d be dead.

  Then Madeline rushed down the gazebo steps without glancing back, like she never wanted to see me again. Which was fine on my end. Except she still had my trophy clutched in her hand.

  I watched from the gazebo until a few minutes later when her trim figure disappeared from sight.

  When I walked home, her Mercedes was gone from the street where I live, but one of my front windows was busted. And in the middle of my living room, in a pile of broken glass, lay Gracie.

  didn’t want to speak with Detective Bradshaw, so instead of calling the cops, I called my landlord who promised to fix the broken window the next day. I also didn’t want to be alone that night, with just cardboard and duct tape between me and darkness, so I crashed on the couch in Channel 3’s greenroom lest I become the victim in one last cover-up murder.

  The greenroom is where news guests wait for their television appearance. It’s a busy place an hour before
each newscast; the rest of the time squatters from various station departments hang out for snacks, naps, and gossip. I slept fitfully because a couple of the overnight techies kept sticking their heads in to see if the couch was clear yet.

  Just the day before, passing by the greenroom, I’d heard one of the assignment editors tittering that Noreen had left the station right after the six o’clock news to meet a mystery date. That was the first rumor I’d heard of our news director having a romantic life. Whether love made her easier or harder for the rest of the newsroom to endure remained an unknown. But unless I spotted Noreen blatantly flashing a ring on her finger, I wasn’t about to utter the L word to her.

  I also wasn’t going to say a word to Madeline about our clash. Or my broken window. In fact, I wasn’t going to say a word to Madeline about anything. But then I started to dream about the dead. Mark. His mother. And whatever Madeline’s game was, I decided I had to play. For their sake.

  So I left a message on her phone, saying something about journalists always playing devil’s advocate and hoping she didn’t take our conversation the other day seriously.

  She didn’t call me back, but her mother did.

  “Madeline’s not available.” Vivian’s voice sounded frosty. “She’s out of town.”

  The Posts had several vacation homes. Madeline could be in Florida, New York, or on the West Coast, just for starters. The Caribbean and Europe were also possibilities. She might have figured it prudent to leave the country for a while.

  “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “If she wanted you to know, I think she would have told you herself. It’s probably best Madeline take a break from the media. She has a personal writing project she wants to pursue. A short story about heartbreak and betrayal.”

  I wondered if her story had a twist ending, perhaps involving the narrator as killer. Write what you know, they say. I tried gauging just how much Vivian knew about our fight. Plenty seemed a safe guess, considering their tight mother-daughter relationship.

  “I think Madeline and I had a misunderstanding,” I said.

  “Madeline explained what happened,” Vivian said. “She found it quite disconcerting that you would think her a murderer.”

  “Again, Madeline and I had a misunderstanding.”

  I wondered if Vivian had her own private suspicions about what happened to Mark. If I had a daughter, would I protect her at all costs, if I thought her capable of murder? Maybe.

  So I didn’t go into the details about why Madeline was about the only spoke left on my suspect wheel. If Vivian knew her daughter’s opal brooch was missing, she might commission a new one to cloud the evidence.

  Then it occurred to me that, under the process of elimination, Vivian showing me her brooch might be just as good as Madeline being unable to show me hers. Of course, I’d have to get it on tape.

  “I want to return her wedding gown,” I said. “I know how much it means to her and I’m not comfortable keeping it any longer.”

  I could hear Vivian breathing on the other end. She seemed to buy my ruse. “Why don’t you bring the dress out to the Peninsula House and leave it with me. I’ll see she gets it.”

  “I had hoped Madeline might do one last camera interview with me. Very short. Just to wrap things up.”

  “Thanks to you, we have a long list of reporters who want to interview my daughter. I’m afraid she’s declining everyone.”

  I explained that in the media world, sometimes the best way to make a pack of journalists go away is to do one interview. The rest generally give up then, and move on to a new story.

  “What if you just gave a statement, Vivian, about the toll this whole ordeal has taken on your family. That would be enough to wrap this story. You’d never hear from me again.”

  Sometimes journalists offer that option as a compromise if an interview subject is an amateur who doesn’t want to be questioned, but we’d still like to hear from them anyway. I’d need to disclose that in the story, by saying something like “Vivian Post made the following statement…”

  She didn’t say no, but she didn’t say yes, either. So I pressed a little harder. If she hung up, she hung up. But somehow, during the next few minutes, Mrs. Post and I reached a deal. I’d stay clear of Madeline. And Vivian agreed to make an on-camera statement asking the public to allow their family privacy to grieve.

  So before she could change her mind, Malik and I headed out to the Peninsula House in stop-and-go rush-hour traffic. On the way, I briefed him on what to expect.

  “Best-case scenario, Malik, she shows us the opal brooch. That’s the money shot.” Or in our case, the murder shot.

  Later, we could argue that because Vivian’s brooch was accounted for, the brooch the police had in evidence must belong to Madeline. I’d already scripted a rough draft in my mind.

  COULD A PIECE OF JEWELRY

  BE THE KEY TO SOLVING A

  MURDER? BURIED IN THE

  SAME GRAVE AS THE

  MISSING GROOM, POLICE

  FOUND A CUSTOM-MADE

  OPAL BROOCH … LIKE THIS

  ONE … WHICH BELONGS TO

  THE MOTHER OF THE

  BRIDE … THE ONLY OTHER

  ONE IN EXISTENCE …

  BELONGED TO THE BRIDE

  HERSELF … WHO WAS

  WEARING IT THE NIGHT

  HER FIANCÉ DISAPPEARED.

  “Okay, get shot of opal brooch,” Malik said. “Got it.” “So after she makes her statement, while the camera’s still rolling, I’ll ask Vivian if she’s aware police found an identical brooch buried with Mark.”

  Malik nodded that he understood the plan. “Got it.” “Now Vivian knows the only other such brooch is owned by her daughter. So there might be some fireworks when she realizes where we’re going with this. But whatever happens, keep the camera rolling unless I tell you to stop.”

  Story subjects sometimes think they can order the camera stopped and started at whim during an interview. They can choose not to answer a question. They can choose to take off their microphone and stomp away. But they can’t tell us when to turn off the camera. Sometimes they try, and those confrontations are virtually guaranteed to make air.

  Normally I try to schedule interviews that might end with tension during the day so we can use natural light. That leads to a faster getaway. Otherwise we have to wait for our portable lights to cool down before packing up all the gear. That can get awkward.

  But it was dark when we arrived at the Post estate, so we didn’t have much choice. I hoped we could slip away after the interview while Vivian was on the phone screaming at her attorney to raise hell with my attorney.

  The Post matriarch watched us pull up in our news cruiser. Her silhouette moved past the window as she disappeared briefly before opening the mansion door.

  “It’s Riley Spartz,” I called. “Thanks for letting us come out, Vivian.”

  I introduced her to Malik as he pushed a cart of equipment into the house while I carried the tripod in one hand and Madeline’s voluminous wedding dress in the other.

  I expected her to be more excited when I handed over the gown, but she simply placed it over the back of a chair while we discussed where to videotape her statement. Then Vivian went upstairs while Malik set up the camera gear and tweaked the settings. She wanted to bring down a few jackets so we could decide which would look better on camera.

  Meanwhile, I wandered over to the family photo corner to admire previous generations. One of their ancestors, who resembled Roderick, held an old revolver I recognized as similar to the one found at the scene of Jean Lefevre’s death.

  I didn’t see the gun in the weapon display case, and couldn’t recall if it had been there the last time I visited. Casually, I coaxed Malik over to videotape the old photograph. Just then Vivian came downstairs and noticed me pointing at the picture.

  “I’ll shoot it later,” he whispered to me.

  “There’s not going to be any later,” I whispered b
ack. “As soon as this interview’s over, we’ll be asked to leave.”

  “Are we ready to begin?” Vivian’s voice had enough of an edge that Malik and I moved back to the interview spot.

  “Certainly.” I tried distracting her. “Let’s see those jackets of yours.” I eliminated one immediately because it had a dark herringbone pattern and those sometimes strobe on camera.

  Malik mounted the camera back on the tripod. Vivian went to the kitchen area, returned with a large glass of water, and took her seat. I’d picked a simple, straight-back chair for her interview so she wouldn’t slouch, rock, or twist. Then Malik clipped a wireless microphone on Vivian’s collar and hid the transmitter in an inside pocket of her blazer. She decided on black instead of navy or gray, all projecting classy images of grief.

  Pinned to her lapel was the same emerald brooch she wore at the charity benefit the other night. I forced myself not to stare at it.

  “Try to ignore the camera, Vivian, and just look at me. That way you’ll appear more natural.”

  She took a sip from her glass, then delivered her line. “My family feels such sorrow for the loss of my daughter’s fiancé. We just hope justice will bring us closure and that with privacy we can grieve.”

  A sincere enough sentiment, but her delivery seemed stilted. She must have realized that, because she repeated it. To try to elicit a more relaxed sound bite I asked if she ever imagined her family would be caught up in something so horrible.

  “Never,” she replied. “It just shows no family is safe from crime.”

  “And how is your daughter doing?”

  “She’s devastated. We feel such sorrow for the loss of her fiancé. We only hope justice will bring closure and that with privacy, we can grieve.”

  We both knew she nailed it.

  Then I admired her emerald brooch. “Madeline tells me you two have quite the mother-daughter collection. I’d love to see it while we wait for the lights to cool.”

  Vivian looked uncomfortable. Like she was thinking, Damn it, I gave them their statement, why won’t they leave?

  “Please, Vivian. I’m an October birthday myself, how about just bringing out the opal? Please?”