Malice in Miniature Read online

  June chose tea over wine and calmed down enough to get started. I managed to hear that Zoe Howard, whom June had known “like, forever” (a lot of language usage had changed since I’d retired from teaching high school English only a couple of years ago), had a boyfriend, Brad Goodman, who was an artist. He was currently working on the stage set for the Lincoln-Douglas debate.

  Richard and I sat at attention on the sofa, across from June. A few sips of tea, and she seemed ready to continue. “Zoe was really happy that Brad got this paying gig,” June said. “I guess there was a lot of competition. The losers . . . well, I guess that’s not a nice way to put it, but that’s what they say . . . the losers work on a big mural together, but the winners get commissions to do individual paintings.”

  “My wife got one of the commissions,” Richard said, with unmistakable pride in his voice. His praise of Mary Lou was unnecessary, since I already knew she was a wonderful painter and June paid no attention.

  “They’ll all be on television on our Channel 29. The crew there are all caught up in the debate because they’re going to video it, then show it over and over all month. It’s great exposure for an artist.”

  “We know. My wife is painting . . .” Richard began, but June still wasn’t interested in anyone else’s story.

  Until she turned to blow her nose and came eye to eye with the dining-room table and two heaping plates of congealing spaghetti marinara. “Omigod, I barged right in on your dinner. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Unless you’re hungry? There’s plenty—”

  June held up her hand and shook her head, a deep frown forming, as if the sight of my best meal all year had turned her stomach. I couldn’t blame her since my specialty had lost its appeal even to me. How could a few degrees—from steaming hot to room temperature—change an aroma from mouthwatering to distasteful?

  “I’m fine,” June said.

  “Please, go on,” I said. “Zoe’s boyfriend, Brad, has a commission to do a painting, and . . . ?”

  Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.

  I was sure June had no idea why the doorbell brought laughs from Richard and me as our quiet evening was turning into one of the busiest of the week. Not to mention traumatic for our sweet neighbor.

  Richard opened the door to his cousin, Skip Gowen, another redheaded Porter (on his mother’s side), safe and sound, I noted. Like Maddie, Skip was an only child who did an extraordinary job of winning people over.

  But not this evening. Skip wore his detective garb—neatly pressed slacks and a sports jacket—and a serious cop look that he seldom brought into my home.

  Richard and Skip exchanged a brief round of “Hey, cuz” and “What’s up?” No answers were offered on the walk from the front door, through my atrium, to where June and I were sitting.

  I expected a pleasant “Hey, Aunt Gerry,” but June rushed up to him as soon as he crossed the threshold into the living room. She crashed into his chest, her head reaching nowhere near his chin. “Skip, I’ve been looking all over for you, leaving messages.” Her words were barely audible until she released her hold on him and we were all seated, across from each other, one more tense than the other.

  “I . . . uh . . . I’ve been tied up all day,” Skip said.

  “I wish you’d called me back,” June said. “I’ve been so frantic.” She twisted a tissue in her hands, tiny white shreds dropping onto her black spandex tights. “There’s been a terrible mistake. They’ve arrested Zoe. She’s in jail. Did you know that?”

  I caught Skip’s expression. I knew my nephew well enough to tell that this wasn’t a surprise to him.

  He pointed in the direction of June’s house. “I went over to talk to you. When you didn’t answer the door, I figured you were here,” Skip said.

  Hmmm. This was Skip’s usual technique of not answering direct questions, as if the person asking were a prime suspect. But this evening more than that was going on. Memories of my nephew when he was about Maddie’s age came to me. “I don’t know who broke that [fill in the blank], Aunt Gerry. Maybe it was Richard,” he’d said on more than one occasion. My nephew had always been transparent when he was being less than honest—at ten years old it was excessive blinking that gave him away, as if he wanted us to know he was not telling the truth—and I saw through him now. I knew he must have a good reason for not admitting what I suspected were the facts, that he hadn’t tried to reach June, and that he’d been hoping to avoid her until he could talk to Richard and me about whatever was on his mind concerning the arrest of her friend.

  I tried to ignore the odor of the spaghetti and shrimp, rapidly going downhill. It didn’t seem the right moment for housekeeping chores. I did, however, prepare a cup of coffee for Skip and put a few of his favorite ginger cookies (from my special recipe) on a plate. I’d kept my ear tuned to the drama unfolding a few yards away as I stood in the kitchen waiting for the whistle of a very slow kettle. I’d heard not a word from Richard, and only a syllable or two from Skip.

  As I came back into the room, June was still holding forth about her friend. “I’ve told you how bad it’s been for Zoe lately, like she’s had this cloud over her head the past month or so. Don’t you remember?”

  Skip nodded, patient. “I know. She had a flat tire—”

  “Four flat tires,” June said, holding up her fingers.

  “Four at once? That is odd,” Richard said, but neither June nor Skip appeared to hear him.

  “And then someone stole her identity and used her Visa in the Philippines.”

  “That happens a lot these days,” Richard said.

  I shot my son a look. He raised his eyebrows and gave a slight shrug that said he was doing his best to bring a sense of normalcy to the situation. I shot another look that said “not now.” He smiled in acquiescence and I was glad we hadn’t lost our ability to communicate nonverbally.

  “Zoe doesn’t even know where the Philippines are. And anyway, that’s not my point. She even thought she was being followed a couple of nights. And her purse was stolen, remember that? Now this. You’ve got to tell them she’s innocent, Skip.”

  He took her hand. It was his turn to speak. “June. You’ll know this soon enough. I’m the one who brought her in. But—”

  June stiffened and gave him a glaring look, made less threatening by the tears escaping from her eyes. She yanked away her hand. “You put Zoe in jail?”

  “Well, not—”

  “Skip, how could you do that? Zoe is my best friend. We’re basically family. I’m all she has.”

  “You need to let me explain. Can you calm down so we can talk?” If the tone of his voice didn’t work to bring June down from her highly charged state, nothing would.

  And nothing did. June stuffed her hands into her orange vest pockets. “I won’t calm down until you make a call and get her out right now.”

  Richard and I, back in our seats across from them, listened intently, as if we were the audience at a great debate.

  Skip’s tone was soft, pleading. “June, honey, you know I can’t do that.”

  June was up and out the door before he could stop her (in reality, any one of the three of us could have halted her progress and scooped her up, given her tiny frame).

  Skip threw up his hands, then buried his head in them for a moment. He hadn’t touched his coffee or a cookie. Bad sign. He looked up at us, seeming surprised that Richard and I were in the room. I guessed Richard felt as awkward as I did.

  “Sorry,” Skip said. He got up and headed for the door.

  “What’s Zoe in jail for?” I asked his retreating back.

  He called over his shoulder, “Murder.”

  Now I knew what Skip had meant by a “touchy” case.

  Though curiosity had been nagging at me during the commotion over Zoe’s plight, I’d had a little time to mentally prepare my response to Richard’s inevitable question about my “solving cases with Maddie,” as June had put it.

  “It was nothing,” I
said. “I needed to do a little research and Maddie helped on the computer.” I snapped my fingers and appealed to a father’s pride. “She’s a whiz at it, you know.”

  “She is good, isn’t she?” He beamed.

  We’d been working together to clean up (optimistically storing the unappetizing meal away for another day), which gave the conversation the casual flair that I wanted, and Richard seemed satisfied.

  Now we took our wineglasses to the living room area for another try at a little togetherness.

  “So who do you think Zoe murdered?” Richard asked. Not our usual family chat agenda.

  “Allegedly,” I said, feeling compassion for a woman I’d met only once or twice in large gatherings. I was sure my feeling had more to do with good-natured, put-together (though not this evening) June Chinn. I couldn’t imagine her being best friends with a murderer. “Anyway, it’s not our business.”

  Richard raised his glass to me, his sly grin partly covered by the crystal. “Good one,” he said.

  If he’d been wearing reading glasses, I’d have sworn it was Ken on the sofa.

  Not five minutes later, the living room came alive again. The door slammed, a heavy backpack thumped on the tile in the entryway, and thick-soled shoes sporting a soccer ball design on their laces hit the atrium floor at breakneck speed.

  “We’re home, we’re home,” Maddie shouted, running to kiss me, then her father.

  “No kidding,” said her father, ruffling her red curls.

  “Pizza, anyone?” Mary Lou asked. She doffed her pink faux-satin baseball cap (which her daughter scorned) and held up a white plastic container in the manner of a waiter with a large, fancy tray.

  Richard jumped up and in one motion kissed his petite wife on the cheek and grabbed the leftovers box. “Sweet,” he said.

  Mary Lou pulled at her hair, still not used to her new, shorter do—a layered design with blond strands of different hues and lengths, no two alike it seemed, the longest of which flipped out slightly just under her ears. She gave her husband a confused look.

  “I was being facetious about the pizza. I thought you two had a nice, quiet, grown-up dinner planned.”

  “Planned but not implemented,” Richard said, his mouth juggling a large bite of newly microwaved pizza. Apparently, my poor boy was ravenous. I thought fondly of our days in the Bronx, when “slice” would have said it all, as when Ken would ask, “Shall we all go out for a slice?”

  “What’s facetious?” Maddie asked me. She addressed the word person in the house—her grandmother, who’d been giving her age-appropriate word-a-day calendars since she was able to turn the pages.

  “It means your mom didn’t know our evening was so exciting that your dad and I didn’t get a chance to eat.”

  “What happened? What happened?” Maddie was in her Xerox phase, duplicating every exclamatory phrase. It was as unnecessary as two (or more) exclamation points at the end of a sentence. I would have taken points off a test if one of my freshman English students had done it, but in Maddie I found it charming.

  I regretted my teasing remark, since I wasn’t eager to involve Maddie in police matters.

  “Oh, we had a little company. How was your day in school?” I asked her.

  She managed to touch her nose with her upper lip. “It was okay.”

  “How about the after-school program? What do they have you doing?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Are you working on crafts?”

  “Nothing much.”

  Her parents had enrolled Maddie in an expensive “nothing much” program near their future home so she could start to bond with her neighbors-to-be.

  “I thought you were going to try to get on the soccer team. Do they know you have a shelf full of trophies?”

  She reached for one of the ginger cookies meant for Skip. “Nah, nah.”

  “It sounds like someone hasn’t had her ice cream yet,” Richard said.

  Maddie brightened a little as we all headed for the kitchen and took up our established dessert duties. I noted how quickly people get into a routine, especially one that gives pleasure. Richard stacked a tray with three flavors of ice cream: double chocolate chip for Maddie and me, spumoni for Mary Lou, and vanilla for himself (I often wondered whether these choices were clues to our personalities); Mary Lou heated the chocolate and caramel sauces from Sadie’s, our local creamery, and emptied a bag of chopped nuts into a small dish; Maddie and I set the table with bowls, spoons, and a replenished plate of ginger cookies.

  All went as smoothly as a well-rehearsed theater production, down to our taking the same places at the table, as if they’d been assigned by a stage director. We dug into our customized sundaes.

  “Why can’t I go to school in Lincoln Point?” Maddie asked me. I knew she’d exhausted her parents with that question already. “I don’t know anyone in Palo Alto.”

  “You don’t know anyone here, either,” Mary Lou said, handing me the jar of sweet-smelling melted chocolate.

  Big mistake, I thought, and I didn’t mean the chocolate sauce.

  Maddie didn’t miss a beat. “I do, too. I do, too. I know lots of kids here.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Jason, Ariana, Abby, Melana, Noah, Natalie . . .” She stopped the roll call and gave an exasperated sigh, as if she didn’t have enough fingers and toes to name all the friends she had in Lincoln Point.

  Besides Jason, who was my friend Linda’s adopted son, I recognized the names of children Maddie had met on her many visits here. I felt a little pride that I’d been a good enough grandmother to have taken her to library reading events and other children’s activities while she was in my care. I hoped her father was taking note.

  “Well, that just proves how easily you make friends,” Richard said. “So in no time at all you’ll have a long list of friends in Palo Alto.”

  “Nuts,” Maddie said.

  I handed her the dish of them, but she was not amused. At least she hadn’t said, “Nuts. Nuts.”

  It was my turn to tuck Maddie in, though she’d bristle at the term. She’d insisted on sleeping in the corner room, the one that had been her father’s, but was hers on her visits through the years.

  “I don’t think I can sleep without the baseball afghan Grandma knitted for me,” Richard had told her when they first arrived.

  “Neither can I,” she’d said.

  Game over.

  Lest I think I’d gotten away with something, as soon as Maddie and I were alone in her room, the baseball afghan in its proper place on her bed, she revisited her earlier question. “I’ll bet it was Uncle Skip.”

  “What, sweetheart?” I asked, to stall for time.

  “Uncle Skip came by and you talked about a case. That’s why you missed dinner.”

  Was my granddaughter that smart, or was I that easy to read? “What makes you think that?”

  “If it was someone else, you would have told me. And if it wasn’t about a case, he would have just sat down and ate with you.”

  “Eaten, sweetheart. Remember? It’s would have eaten.”

  “Okay, never mind. I’m tired anyway.”

  And my miniature detective was off to sleep, giving me a little reprieve.

  As Maddie had gotten older and stayed up later, adult conversation time got shorter, but Richard, Mary Lou, and I had developed the habit of having a current events and “how was your day” chat before we went to bed, no matter how late. Richard would share what he could about his new staff and duties at the hospital; Mary Lou seemed always to have an art fact of the day: a way to create a richer purple in watercolor, or the scoop on a new brush; I reported on odds and ends in the worlds of GED tutoring and teaching and doing crafts.

  Tonight when I returned to the living room, Richard was briefing Mary Lou on the drama that had cost him his fresh shrimp marinara.

  “We’re waiting for the eleven o’clock news,” he said to me, his fingers poised on the television remote. “Ten more minutes.” He poin
ted the control at the screen and switched it on. “Now that the minor child is asleep, we can hear the story and the gory details of a murder in Lincoln Point.”

  “Is your life that boring, honey?” Mary Lou teased. In fact we all knew it was anything but, with his new job and new staff at Stanford, and the new house that took a lot of oversight from both him and Mary Lou.

  With the television on mute while we waited, we did a remarkable job of pursuing the topic of the evening, considering how little information we had.

  “Let me see if I have it right. It was this artist boyfriend of June’s friend who was murdered?” Mary Lou asked.

  “We don’t know for sure,” I said. “June was just getting started when Skip came in.”

  “How was the person killed?” Mary Lou asked.

  “We don’t know,” Richard said. “June was just getting started, et cetera, et cetera.” He twirled his fingers in the air, Yul Brynner style, surprising me that anyone his age had seen The King and I.

  “Where did the murder take place?”

  “We have no idea,” I said.

  “What’s the evidence against June’s friend that got her arrested?”

  “We have no idea,” Richard said, a mimicking grin across his face.

  “Do we know where the body was found or who found it?”

  “No, we don’t,” Richard and I said together.

  Mary Lou was the first to laugh. “Sorry to sound crass, but maybe we should move on to something we can actually discuss.”

  “Like your painting,” I said, slightly dizzy from the impossible quiz. “How’s that coming?”

  Mary Lou could talk a long time about her passion, watercolor. She’d been happy to land a flexible-hours job at a gallery in nearby Mountain View so that she could carve out long periods of time for painting.

  The problem was finding a place to work while her state-of-the-art loft was under construction as part of their Palo Alto home. The Rutledge Center, a city-owned complex of buildings, had offered space to the artists like the elusive (murdered?) Brad, of “Zoe and Brad,” who were working on the Lincoln-Douglas project.