Malice in Miniature Page 4

  I knew it wasn’t unusual to see children in extracurricular classes on a weekday afternoon—Palo Alto wasn’t the only school district where the teachers could have professional days.

  “This place is big,” Maddie said, running her hand along a brick interior wall.

  “Can I help you?”

  A short, thin young man in his early thirties, I guessed, wearing a blue-gray security company uniform, came toward us from a hallway to our right. Even stubble covered his whole head. Unless my memory was failing, this was one person between the ages of nineteen and forty-eight years old who had not been my student during my long tenure at Abraham Lincoln High School. A transplant, apparently.

  “What’s the yellow tape for?” Maddie asked, before I could answer.

  “Oh, just some little problem the police have to look into,” the young man said. “Nothing you have to worry about, honey.”

  I was grateful for his discretion.

  “My uncle—well, he’s really my dad’s cousin, so he’s my cousin once-removed—he’s a Lincoln Point homicide detective.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty impressive.”

  I broke in finally. “We’re here to deliver a painting.”

  He looked at my empty hands and raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s in my car. I didn’t want to carry it in until I knew where to put it.”

  “It’s a painting by my mom, Mary Lou Porter, for the Lincoln-Douglas debate,” Maddie said. “She’s going to be finishing it in your work area.”

  Why hadn’t I thought of saying that?

  “Cool,” said the young man.

  I introduced myself belatedly and reached out to shake hands.

  “Ryan Colson, Noble Security,” he said.

  “Were you guarding the place where the crime happened?” Maddie asked.

  How embarrassing! Not that the question hadn’t crossed my mind.

  “Aren’t you the little detective,” Ryan said. “Following in the footsteps of your uncle?” He stepped back and held up his hands as if he were guilty of a grievous sin. “Whoa, I mean your cousin once-removed.”

  Maddie gave him a full smile, an expression she’d gone back to now that her teeth were all nearly even. “Maybe,” she said.

  I put my hand on Maddie’s red curls. “Sorry to be so intrusive,” I said to Ryan.

  “No problem. Why don’t you drive around the north side? It’s closer to the workshop. Everything is unlocked until five o’clock, so you can do it later if you want. The rain might have stopped by then, too.” He whipped out a business card. “This has my pager number. Give a call if you need help carrying it in.”

  “Thanks.” I wanted to add, “Sorry about the little detective,” but decided to let it go.

  Ryan tipped an imaginary hat. A very pleasant young man.

  But I noticed he didn’t answer Maddie’s question. Had he been on duty during the yellow-tape incident?

  Chapter 4

  Once we got back to the car, wet and cold, Maddie changed her mind about lunch.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “Can we go for bagels now?”

  It sounded good to me, too, so we backtracked along Springfield Boulevard to Willie’s. We could easily drop off Mary Lou’s painting on the way home.

  Bagels by Willie had a New York City décor that I loved. Depending on where you sat, you had a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Washington Square arch, the Wollman Rink in Central Park, or unidentifiable throngs on one tree-lined midtown street or another. I felt it was the only true environment for eating a bagel, though I’d read somewhere that the bagel was invented in seventeenth-century Poland.

  Maddie always ordered the most artless items on the menu. Plain bagel, plain cream cheese, and potato chips with no added flavor. I liked to branch out; this afternoon, well past my earlier cinnamon craving, I tried an asiago cheese bagel with sun-dried tomato spread. Maddie pinched her nose as our waitress, Lourdes Pino, one of my GED students, pretended to get the order wrong and put my aromatic, spicy plate in front of my picky granddaughter. I knew if it weren’t such a busy time, with a large lunch crowd, Lourdes would have teased Maddie further.

  “What do you think happened there, Grandma?”

  To save time, I skipped the pretense that I didn’t understand the question. “I don’t know. Maybe someone broke into the building. It could have been a poor person without a home who needed a warm place to sleep.”

  She gave me a doubtful look. “Right, right.” She bit into her bagel sandwich and gave a self-conscious giggle when white cream cheese squirted out all around the circumference. “I think it’s something Uncle Skip will have to solve and he’ll need our help.”

  “Have you been reading that book I gave you on the Lincoln-Douglas debates?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s kind of beneath my reading level, though. It said ages ten to twelve, but I could have read it when I was eight, I’ll bet.”

  “I’ll bet you’re right. So that must mean you finished it.”

  She shook her head slightly. “I know they were talking about slavery, though. And there were seven debates, all around the state of Illinois. That’s between Iowa and Indiana.”

  Better than I could have done, geographically speaking. “Very good. Lincoln and Douglas traveled over four thousand miles in the course of that campaign. And you know traveling around was a lot harder at that time, more than a hundred years ago.”

  I knew Maddie’s attention span for things that old was limited. Her gaze wandered around Willie’s and then out the window behind me.

  “There’s that crazy lady again,” she said.

  “What crazy lady?”

  “Me and Mom . . . oops, Mom and I saw her at the supermarket last week.”

  “Nice recovery,” I said as we high-fived to celebrate the survival of correct grammar.

  “The lady was crouched down near the bananas.”

  “Maybe she dropped one.”

  “Nah, she was, like, walking in a squat. I think she was hiding from someone. Now she’s out there yelling at some other lady who bumped into her on the sidewalk.”

  I didn’t want to turn to see what had drawn Maddie’s attention. I wasn’t happy about the idea that Maddie might be insensitive to a homeless person, or someone otherwise not “normal.” Lincoln Point had its share of people who, for one reason or another, had fallen on hard times and wandered its public places. I wouldn’t belabor it now, but I planned to make a bigger effort to see that Maddie grew up with compassion toward the disenfranchised.

  “Maybe she can’t help the way she is,” I said. “And anyway, is that really more interesting than what Lincoln and Douglas were arguing about?”

  She rolled her eyes. “When’s Aunt Beverly coming home?” she asked. She didn’t quite say that Aunt Beverly was more interesting than me, but I knew enough to move on.

  “That reminds me,” I said, pulling a postcard out of my purse. On one side of the card was a photo of a monkeypod tree, on the other a note from my sister-in-law and dearest friend, Skip’s mother. “It’s from Aunt Beverly. I forgot I had it. It came yesterday and it’s addressed to all of us.”

  Maddie plucked the card from my hand and read. “Gorgeous sunsets here every night. Nick’s teaching me how to snorkel.” Maddie waved the card in the air. “Lucky, lucky Aunt Beverly. I’ve always wanted to snorkel.”

  Maddie often expressed desires like this, as if she were experiencing a midlife crisis, regretting that she hadn’t fulfilled her lifelong dream. Whereas, she’d only known the meaning of “snorkel” for a couple of years.

  “Maybe Uncle Nick will teach you.” I was almost comfortable using “uncle” for retired cop Nick Marcus, whom Beverly had been dating for a short while. She’d known him for years, however, working with him on a civilian volunteer program for the Lincoln Point Police Department, all of which made Aunt Beverly more interesting than me. The trip to Hawaii was a milestone in their carefully watched (by Skip and me) relationship.
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br />   Maddie grunted. “You can’t snorkel in Palo Alto.”

  “I was thinking of San Francisco. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” In fact, it didn’t, to a landlubber like me.

  “What did Uncle Skip’s dad do?” Maddie asked, more or less out of the blue.

  “He worked in electronics. You’ve seen his photos with all the equipment around him. Uncle Skip looks a lot like him, except for the red hair all you Porters have.” I leaned over and moved one of Maddie’s red curls off her forehead.

  “No, I mean why did he die?”

  Uh-oh. There were certain things I found it hard to talk about with an eleven-year-old. Among them were war, violent crime, and death. Eino Gowen Sr. had never come back from the first Gulf War. I didn’t know how much Richard and Mary Lou had satisfied this particular aspect of their daughter’s curiosity. We’d skirted around this information with Maddie in the past and now I wondered if it was time to tell her another fact or two.

  “Uncle Skip’s dad went overseas with the army,” I began. “We don’t know exactly what happened, just that he was missing and they were never able to find him.”

  “So he wasn’t sick, like Grandpa?”

  “No, not like Grandpa.” Not the long, debilitating struggle against the leukemia that had killed Ken and nearly killed me from grief.

  “And he wasn’t just home and working, like my dad’s doing now?”

  Where is this going? “No, not like your dad is now.”

  “Uncle Skip said he was eleven years old when it happened.”

  And there it is. Maddie was doing some math, wondering if losing a father at eleven ran in the family.

  I reached across Willie’s black-and-white-tile tabletop and took her sticky hands in mine. She came around the table and leaned against me. I held her close. “Your dad is very young and very healthy, sweetheart, and nothing’s going to happen to him.”

  Before Maddie came into my life, I wondered how adults could make such promises. Now that I was a grandmother, I understood.

  I felt Maddie’s deep breathing. What had brought this on, besides being eleven years old? Moving away from her familiar home and neighborhood? I’d read that moving was one of the top three or four activities to cause stress. Whatever it was, I resolved to help my granddaughter through it.

  Maddie seemed to have bounced back to her normal ebullience on the drive back to the Rutledge Center. Maybe she was just hungry, I thought, and resolved to keep both nutritious and nonnutritious snacks handy at all times. She chattered on about a travelogue her class had seen, featuring the New Seven Wonders of the World. Maddie enjoyed being able to name them, whereas I stumbled after the Great Wall of China and the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. I hoped her uplifted spirits weren’t due to the prospect of revisiting a crime scene.

  The Rutledge Center complex was as much a labyrinth as a set of buildings and walkways, taking up a whole block between Hanks Road and Gettysburg Boulevard. I drove around three times before I found the correct entrance, nearest where security officer Ryan Colson had pointed to as the artists’ work area. I pulled up to the north door of the facility and retrieved Mary Lou’s painting, encased in a flat black portfolio, from the trunk. As hoped for, the rain had stopped. Maddie and I and the oversize cardboard protector trundled up a few steps to a blue metal door marked simply a. From the worn-out black paint, I assumed the letter was left over from the days of the Rutledge School and its system of lettering classroom pods.

  The door, which was unlocked as promised by Ryan, opened into an enormous warehouse-type room. The massive floor was covered with workbenches, easels, and piles of opened and unopened cartons. Tables were stacked high with tools and woodworking projects in progress. I recognized sections of the set for the debate stage, reminding me of my own unfinished, room-box political rally at home.

  At some point in the next couple of days, I’d have to come back with my camera. If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d have brought it with me today. It was definitely harder to keep everything straight with three extra people, as wonderful as they were, in a house I hadn’t shared in a long time.

  I’d also neglected to get details from Mary Lou as to exactly who should take custody of the painting or where I should deposit it.

  The few people in this wing were gathered into a far corner about forty yards away, apparently meeting around a watercooler (I could see the familiar shape of a five-gallon jug against the wall).

  The door banged behind us, the noise causing only a slight stir among the members of the group.

  “I’ll go over there and ask them where we should put this,” Maddie said, already breaking into a run. She was still delightfully awkward, with skinny arms and legs lacking graceful coordination. How she got to be a trophy-winning soccer player was a mystery, though I remembered Richard’s telling me that everyone on Maddie’s team won some kind of prize.

  I propped the portfolio against my leg and waited, happy I’d worn my lined denim jacket. It was colder inside the building than outside. I stood near a pile of red-white-and-blue banners. More stage setting and another reminder—I needed flag fabric for my room box. I watched Maddie reach the group, turn, and point.

  At the same time, I heard another loud bang as metal door a slammed again.

  I turned to see who else had an errand in this hollow hall.

  June Chinn, in jeans and a soft brown hoodie, was who.

  In one hand she held a large cardboard box, empty, from the easy way she carried it. She stopped short when she saw me and tossed the box aside, sending it across the floor. A wide smile broke out on her face.

  “Gerry, I should have known you’d be here. I knew you’d be willing to help.”

  “I’m surprised to see you, June. I’m just here delivering a painting for my—”

  She came over and buried her head on my chest. Her arms closed tight around me. “I knew I could count on you to help Zoe out of this mess, Gerry. Thank you. Thank you.”

  She seemed to have picked up on Maddie’s double phrasing. What could I say? That I wasn’t in a position to help? That I wasn’t a cop? That I had no information on the case? And absolutely no right to seek any?

  I looked at June’s sad, hopeful face, and at her hands, mostly covered by the long sleeves of her hoodie.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  We found two folding chairs against a close wall and took seats next to each other, knees almost touching. I had a stream of questions. I started with my top two.

  “Who exactly is Zoe accused of murdering, June? Does it have anything to do with the crime-scene tape outside this building?” No time for smooth editing. I spoke in hurried whisper, aware that Maddie might be back at any moment.

  “Someone killed Zoe’s boyfriend, Brad Goodman, like I told you last night.” June sounded frustrated, as if no one ever paid attention to her. In fact, she hadn’t told us anything last night beyond the fact that her best friend was in jail. She pointed to the carton she’d thrown aside. “She wants me to pick up some of her stuff from his locker. They’re outdoors in one of those covered walkways, but I can’t get through from that side of the building. They have it all roped off.”

  June made no mention of the rope’s being crime-scene tape. From the way she talked, she might have been stopped by silk cord like the kind used to reserve front-row seats at the opera or by white organdy bows to mark the first few rows at a wedding ceremony.

  “I saw the tape,” I said.

  “They’re sure making it hard for us.”

  There seemed to be no end to the inconvenience Brad’s murder brought to June and her friend. I wasn’t used to this facet of my neighbor and (I’d once hoped) potential niece-in-law.

  “So Brad was murdered here?”

  June nodded, with a “wouldn’t you know?” look. “He wasn’t at all well liked, you know,” she said. “He was very pushy about getting ahead with his art career.”

  I did my best to dismiss the realization th
at my lovely neighbor might be implying that Zoe’s boyfriend got what he deserved.

  I looked across the hall to check on Maddie. She was no longer with the group of people by the watercooler. A murderer had been (is still?) in this building, and I don’t see my granddaughter. I felt a shiver of panic.

  Short-lived, fortunately, as I saw Maddie off to the side, engaged in animated conversation with a woman and a man from the group, benevolent staff members, I hoped. The woman was pointing out features on a life-size figure of Abraham Lincoln. (From this distance, my only clues about the identity of the likeness were the tall stature and the signature stovepipe hat.) How predictable that my granddaughter had become attracted to the various props and scenery scattered around the hall. The man seemed to trail behind them. If he was talking, it was gesture-less commentary since his hands were in his pockets.

  I shifted my body so that I could face June and still see Maddie. False alarm or not, I had to be more watchful.

  June’s mouth was drawn, her lovely almond-shaped eyes puffy and ringed with red. Even on casual Saturdays, I’d never seen her rich black hair as it was today—pulled back in a runty ponytail with ends flying every which way.

  “Brad’s body was somewhere over there.” June answered my pre-distraction question. She pointed to the east end of the complex and all but stamped her small foot. She pulled on the cords of her sweatshirt hood. I noticed another sign of her anguish and indifference to her appearance—no colorful lacy undershirt poking above the sweatshirt zipper today, just a white crew-neck T-shirt, loose and wrinkled.

  I stood and held my arms out to June. She responded immediately, stepping into a tight embrace, then relaxing against me.

  “I’m so sorry, Gerry,” she said, between deep breaths. “I can’t seem to approach this rationally. Zoe is like the sister I never had, and I’m hers, you know? I kept it together when I visited her in jail this morning, but now here I am lashing out at the only person who’s offered to help.”