Baby Doll Games (24 page)

Authors: Margaret Maron

Tags: #mystery

BOOK: Baby Doll Games

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Rikki was sobbing openly now and he put his arm around her. “Don’t cry, Rikki.”
“Only pictures?” she sobbed. “I didn’t know. I thought you had-Oh Nate, I’ve been so frightened for you. When I heard Emmy storming about a photograph-”
“Somehow I left one of these mixed in with the prints of last winter’s dance class,” said Nate. “She came in with a plaid ribbon Saturday, said she thought it belonged to Mandy Gillespie. Poor little Mandy.”
Sigrid stopped him. “Mr. Richmond, I think it’s time to warn you and Miss Innes, before you say anything else, that you do have a right to a lawyer. Albee?”
Stunned, the two listened numbly as Elaine Albee read them their rights under the Miranda ruling.
“Do you understand, Mr. Richmond?” Sigrid repeated when Elaine had finished.
“Yes,” said Richmond, “but it’s okay, I tell you. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Miss Innes?”
“Y-yes,” the pale-haired dancer quavered, “but Nate couldn’t have killed Emmy. He was working the lights.”
“Killed
Emmy?”
His gnome-like face was shocked. “Of course I couldn’t. Look-could we sit down?”
He led them from the darkroom to the low round table in the middle of his workshop and pulled, out chairs for everyone. Rikki Innes clung to his side and he patted her consolingly. “Emmy was my friend. We go back forever and in the end I think I did make her understand, though I had to promise I wouldn’t take any more of these pictures. You heard her, Rikki.”
"‘Is that what she meant?” Rikki asked, fresh tears sliding down her cheek. “You didn't tell me and then later when she said-”
“When she said what, Miss Innes?” asked Sigrid. “When she said she’d found Amanda Gillespie’s missing hair ribbon in the pocket of Mr. Richmond’s jacket?”
“What?” said Nate.
“She had moved the rest of her winter clothes to the dressing room upstairs,” Sigrid told him. “Either she’d taken your jacket home with her last spring or it’d been hanging up there mixed in with other things. Whichever, something unexpected happened Saturday. The weather changed early Saturday morning and instead of Indian summer, it was suddenly chilly. So Emmy Mion ran upstairs and by sheer accident took the first jacket she came to. Your red-plaid jacket, Mr. Richmond. And when she eventually put her hands in the pocket sometime that morning, she came out with the hair ribbon Amanda’s killer had picked up automatically last February.”
In a wordless silence broken only by Rikki’s hopeless weeping, Nate shook his head as if dazed by the lieutenant’s scenario.
Implacably, Sigrid hammered home her accusations. “That’s when you knew you’d have to kill Emmy, too.”
“But I
didn't
! I
couldn't
have! A hundred people
know
I was upstairs, working the lights from the rear booth.”
“You see?” cried Rikki. “You know he couldn’t have.”
“Yes, but you could have, Miss Innes.”
“Emmy’s killer was a man,” said Nate. “A male dancer.”
“No.” Sigrid shook her head slowly. “Ginger Judson told us Saturday afternoon that Emmy almost laughed out loud when the jack-o’-lantern first came onstage, even before he’d begun to pantomime Eric Kee’s style. Emmy laughed because she had seen Cliff Delgado use his wife’s paint mask as a burlesque codpiece and knew that Rikki had stuffed the mask down the front of her tights in order to disguise her sex. Emmy thought it was more fun and games and she died for it.
“When you doused the lights, Miss Innes ran off stage right, then immediately doubled back between the screen and the wall so she’d be in her right place when the lights came back on. As she ran, she removed the mask and pumpkin head and flung them out in the passage where they were kicked under the stairs in all the confusion.” Rikki Innes had folded her arms upon the low table and buried her face. Her pale hair fanned out on the table around her.
“Rikki?” Nate touched her shoulder gently. “Rikki? But you loved Emmy.”
She nodded without lifting her head.
“You loved her, Rikki Why would you kill her?”
She raised her face to him then and that delicate oval was blotched and puffy “I loved you more, Nate, and she thought you’d killed Mandy”
“But I
didn't!
” he said and exasperation mingled with raw grief in his voice. Then disbelief and horror swept over him. “Oh God, Rikki! Not Mandy, too?”
“I had to, Nate. She saw you with a camera pressed against that hole and figured out what you were taking pictures of. It scared her. And it scared me when she told me. Suddenly, all I could think of was how you always had more time for the children than you had for me.”
Her ravaged eyes held his and her voice dropped in shame. “You never make love to me unless I ask. Yet the children… forever rubbing against you, your hands caressing them-”
“Not like that!” I never actually let myself-”
“How could I be sure?” she cried, half-angered by his denial of guilt. “You were always here at the theater. If it wasn’t for Emmy or Ginger and if it wasn’t for me, who else was there? And then Mandy said she was going to tell her mother. I couldn’t have that. Whatever you’d done- even if it was
that
-I couldn’t let her destroy you. So I said I’d take her to tell her mother and I grabbed up your jacket-and-”
She buried her face again.
It was then that Mick Cluett finally arrived. Sigrid threw him an interrogative glance and he nodded to confirm that she had reasoned correctly: Sergio Avril had indeed followed Rikki Innes’s instructions to the T, which meant he’d been deliberately led to erase Mrs. Gillespie’s message.
If Emmy Mion had left the ribbon in her desk drawer as she’d left the picture, Rikki would have destroyed it, too, and there would have been nothing left to link the child’s death to Emmy’s.
Sigrid rose from her chair feeling drained and soiled. “Book them both,” she ordered.
Nate Richmond’s head came up at that. “
Me?
I didn’t know-”
“You may not be charged for murder,” Sigrid said, and her voice had gone as slate-cold as her eyes, “but I will be triple damned if we don’t find some way to keep you away from children the rest of your life.”
She handed the box of pictures to Elaine.
“But I explained about that!”
“Not to Amanda Gillespie, you didn’t,” she said and turned away as Mick Cluett unsnapped the handcuffs from his belt.

Chapter 28

Personal notes of Dr. Christa Ferrell, re: Corrie Makaroff [Wednesday, 4 November-I must not internalize this. I am a professional. Nothing should surprise me. Never again will I let myself forget that, though how any professional could have foreseen-This has been a ghastly day. Anne Harald pretended to be sympathetic, but I can see where Sig. gets her judgmental attitude. How does she know so much about preconceptualization & how dare she apply that tag to me?
Oh hell-blast-& DAMN!!!
I can see Dr. Hennemann now-short, fat, & dumpy,
with an ugly moustache on her upper lip. “Yah," she told me a couple of years ago during an evaluation. "You haf good grades, good skills, good luck, but you rush too quick to diagnosis. Too much preconception on insufficient data.”
Well, I don't care. It was a classic case & even if I did preconceptualize a little bit, I should have been right.
Since Sig. H. & I were at St. M’s together, A.H. has promised not to use the Makaroff case in her magazine series although she says Sig. will have to be told. (NB- better check with Dads lawyer about what constitutes slander in case she doesn't keep her word.)
Wish to God I hadn’t told Dr. Hennemann I was preparing a paper for next summer's conference. On the other hand, if A.H. keeps quiet about me, perhaps I can still salvage this case. After all, no real damage done. I’ll continue to treat Corrie & none of my colleagues need ever know how close I came to screwing up her therapy.
Galls to think how when I called A H. yesterday to confirm today's photo session, I told her she could expect some really great action pics, that Corrie would probably act out the whole scene. Well, I was certainly right about that, wasn’t I? Oh bloody HELL!]
Once again I had set the stage before Corrie arrived: G.I. Joe and Barbie on the hassock, the toy hammer on the floor beside it, the little brown bear and schoolgirl doll on a nearby chair.
Corrie tried to shy away and look at some picture books beside the door, but I led her over to the dolls and again we talked of how grown-ups may say and do dreadful things which they afterwards regret. Especially if they’ve been drinking.
“It isn’t their fault,” I reassured her.
Corrie’s blue-green eyes looked deeply into mine. The timing felt so right to me that I said, “Do you remember how your mommy and Ray used to yell at each other?” Her eyes dropped, but she nodded.
“Show me,” I said softly.
Hesitantly at first, and then more surely as she finally let herself relive the past, Corrie picked up the dolls and worked her way back to that dreadful evening.
Darlene must have been drinking heavily, for the little bear and the schoolgirl doll both begged her not to drink any more.
“Just shut up, you two. I'm getting sick and tired of everybody telling me what to do. Get to bed!”
“Aw, cool off, babe.” It was a creditable imitation of a masculine voice.
“You shut up, too.”
“Aw, whatcha getting so steamed up about?”
“Shove it, Ray! One lousy window in this god-awful sweatbox and you can’t get the damn thing open.”
"I'll get the fucking window open. Give me another drink and quit yapping.”
Maneuvering the G.I. Joe figure, Corrie leaned over and, for the first time, picked up the toy hammer. “Oops!” she said in the Ray voice.
The obscenities that poured from Corrie’s lips then would have startled me if earlier sessions hadn't prepared me for Darlene’s foul mouth.
“Shut up, shut up,
shut up!”
screamed the Ray voice and suddenly Corrie had the G.I. Joe pounding the Barbie doll with the toy hammer.
“Stop it!” cried the schoolgirl doll. “Oh, please, stop!” The hammer fell to the floor.
“Oh, Jesus!” said the Ray voice.
Corrie pushed the G.I. Joe off the hassock and her voice was her own again as she quavered, “Ray ran away and Mommy just laid there and Tonnie tried to make her get up and she wouldn’t and Tonnie said she was dead and she called the police and told them Ray killed our mommy-and-”
She dissolved in a flood of tears and I pulled her close to me and let her cry out all the grief she’d been holding in for so long.
Part of me was still absorbed in the traumatic scene the child had witnessed, but the other part exulted because my baby doll games had paid off. Corrie had finally unblocked and now a healthy integrated healing could begin.
[It really had been a textbook case, one Yd enjoy presenting to the conference, I thought smugly. I couldn’t resist a triumphant smile toward the one-way window where
I
hoped A. H.'s cameras had captured some of the drama. Okay, maybe I was thinking of myself a little right then as I held the sobbing child, imagining how Mrs. Harold’s magazine article would help get my private practice off to a flying start; but I swear to God I was also thinking how great it was that I could end up my stint w! Social Services by giving the Berkowitzes such a happily- ever-after ending.
A moment later, Corrie pulled away & turned the Barbie doll over. "Oh, my head” she moaned in a wobbly imitation of her mother’s voice, & the ground slid out from under me as the schoolgirl doll lifted the toy hammer & pounded her back into silence