Murder in Miniature (6 page)

Chuck frowned at Jason. “Watch your mouth,” he told him, then turned to me. “Can me and my family have a private moment here, Ger?”

Grrr
. I hated to be called “Ger,” and Chuck knew it. I felt like asking him to reimburse me for the time I’d be away from my paid-for table, but Linda had been through enough. I held my tongue, bypassed Chuck, and addressed Linda. “Watch my table, will you, Linda?”

I walked away reluctantly, remembering the last time I’d left her in charge of my goods.

From my deliberately chosen seat at the lunch table
along the east wall of the school hall, I could make out the body language between Linda and Chuck. It involved a lot of in-your-face movements from Chuck and retreating, cross-armed gestures from Linda. Then, vice versa. I was doing well, making educated guesses about who was winning each round until Betty (Tudor Mansion) Fine sat down across from me. There were few people in the dining area midafternoon, and I wished she’d taken her coffee to any of the six empty tables.

“How nice to have you to myself, Geraldine,” Betty said, making me feel guilty about wanting to shoo her away. Betty had been making Tudor dollhouses and villages for as long as I could remember, and today her bouffant dyed-blond hairdo seemed as tall as the steeple on her country church. The elaborate coiffure blocked my view of Linda and Chuck, putting a severe damper on my spying.

I had no inclination to visit with Betty, but I knew that complimenting her work was often enough to keep her entertained and chatting unilaterally for a long time. I threw out a conversation starter.

“What a wonderful attic setting you have this year,” I said, looking past her at Chuck, in the lead, with his finger pointing at Linda’s chest.

“Oh, thank you, Geraldine. I made the little easel from some flat toothpicks I got at the dollar store.”

“Really?” Now Linda was poking Chuck’s chest.

“I used finger paint for the little unfinished landscape on the canvas, which is just a piece of muslin.”

“Really?” Chuck had his hands on his hips. I thought I made out a frown to match Linda’s.

“I noticed you’re teaching a found-objects class at the adult school,” Betty said.

“Really?”
Oops, wrong comment
. Of all days for Betty to reach out beyond her happy talk. “Yes, I am, Betty.”

Chuck took off his hat, wiped his brow, and paced the small area in front of Linda’s table.

“I’ve signed up, but I wondered if you could give me a few little clues to get started ahead of time.” Betty dug in her purse (giving me a chance while her head was down to see Chuck put his hat back on), and pulled out a plastic bag full of items she’d been saving (which I pretended to study, while actually catching Linda in the act of turning her back on Chuck and settling in her seat).

“Well?” Betty asked.

I had no idea what her question had been. I’d been following Chuck, who was rounding the aisle past Table 29, headed in my direction. The look on his face said he wouldn’t call me
Ger
this time.

“Keep out of things that are not your business, Geraldine,” he said. His voice had an underlying growl, which I supposed was meant to frighten me. But I couldn’t take him seriously, perhaps because I had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps because his breath reeked of alcohol. Or perhaps because of his silly cowboy hat.

“What was that all about?” Betty asked.

“Don’t worry about it, Betty,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do with these old pillboxes.”

If Linda was counting on a very busy last hour on Saturday
evening so she wouldn’t have to talk to me, she got her wish. Customers poured in for the raffle at five (Betty’s granddaughter won a split-level ranch donated by Gail Musgrave, inexplicably making me feel better about my rude behavior to Betty), and the crowd stayed around until closing.

I had a new respect for the cliché, “we need to talk.” The phrase was short and sweet, and with the proper tone, spoke volumes. I said it to Linda once when we happened to lean toward each other to get an item from our totes, and again when a mutual customer was distracted by writing two checks.

Unfortunately, an observation is not a question, and Linda could just give me that look and be done with it.

“Why is Chuck on my case?” I asked her another time. She treated the query as she did the cliché. Finally, I decided Chuck was right that I should mind my own business. Linda had a right to her privacy. Picking up a friend did not entitle one to know any more details than the friend was willing to share.

Once this fair was over, Linda and I would have a nice, leisurely lunch, and by then I would have forgotten about the irresponsible behavior, the strange trip to a questionable neighborhood, the missing Governor Winthrop desk, and the bloody cheesecloth.

Clearly, I’d forgotten nothing yet.

I loved coming home to a meal prepared by someone
else, especially my family. After a grueling (a mini- exaggeration) day at the fair, I opened the door from my garage to my kitchen and was greeted by the smells of Italy. Or at least Beverly’s version of Italy. Beverly and Ken used to claim there had been an Italian infiltration into the Porter clan a few generations back, and that a secret recipe for tomato sauce had been handed down by “Nonna Lombardo.”

The feast was nearly ready. All I had to do was change out of my sweats, stained with drops of gold leaf and a smear of cherry-wood varnish, slip into a comfortable caftan, and show up at the table.

Saturday night’s menu included an enormous escarole salad and the Lombardo special, spaghetti and beef
bracciola
, with a substitute of meatballs for Maddie. Wine for the adults, cola for Maddie, and warm bread for all. The glass- top patio table had been set with plates and napkins Beverly had brought me from Italy. I sat next to Maddie, facing my lovely two-toned blue home.

Nearly every home in our Eichler neighborhood was a pale color with a darker trim, a double rainbow effect that Ken and I loved. My heart swelled. If only everyone could have such moments with a loving family. But,
if only Ken and Skip’s dad, Eino Sr., hadn’t left us
, was always at the back of my mind.

Beverly, lean and fit herself, and without a heart episode for at least two years, kept telling me I was still too thin (I’d gained back only half the weight I lost while caring for Ken). She and Skip carried out their fattening mission in subtle ways. Like placing the breadbasket and butter closest to my place, scooping an extra serving of everything onto my plate, and being sure dessert was chocolate- based. Tonight I’d noticed a batch of Beverly’s brownies on my counter, and she personally saw to it that there was always ice cream in my freezer and chocolate sauce in my pantry.

Even though temperatures had reached the nineties during the day, the evening was cool, with a slight breeze. One of the nice things about living in the Bay Area. I remembered summer nights in the Bronx when Ken and I would try to get relief by sleeping on the roof of our multistory building. Most often the air was not much cooler than inside our non-air-conditioned apartment. Steam rose from the tar and spilled from the bricks, and the humidity would hover around 80 percent through the night.

“Mmmmm. Smells good over there.” The voice of our neighbor whose house was pale green with dark green trim, June Chinn. She’d hoisted her small frame onto a tipped- over crate (I’d seen it many times) and rested her arms on the fence between us. Eichler neighborhoods tended to be friendlier than most California tracts and subdivisions, as if sharing the same unique architecture bonded us all with the master builder, Joseph Eichler. “Don’t you have a date tonight, Skip?” June asked.

“The night is young,” Skip said, and gave her a wink.

“I’m here all night, Officer,” June said, and disappeared into her yard, probably blush red at her boldness. Beverly and I shared a glance, both wishing we knew more about Skip’s late-night adventures, both looking forward to the day when he brought someone home more than once. Beverly reminded him often that June, a tech writer at one of the few surviving dot-coms in Silicon Valley, was cute and single. We’d stopped inviting June to dinner for Skip’s benefit, but I enjoyed the light flirtation they kept up.

Skip had another way of putting an end to his mother’s and my nagging him to settle down. He’d turn it around and ask when we were going to date again. Enough said.

Tonight there was another country to hear from, and Beverly and I could remain neutral.

“June is pretty. Do you like her, Uncle Skip?” Maddie asked, just before squeezing half a meatball into her mouth. Leave it to the very young to come right out with it. She washed it all down with a long swallow of cola. Tomorrow night she’d have only milk to drink, I told myself.

Dum dum dum-dum
…strains of “Hail to the Chief,” from Skip’s cell phone. I wondered if he’d called himself somehow to avoid his first-cousin-once-removed’s question.

Skip raised his finger in an excuse-me gesture and stepped onto the grass past the patio bricks. He rested his black-sneakered foot on one of a ring of stones that surrounded my birdbath. We heard nothing but
uh-huhs
on our end.

“Gotta go,” Skip said, clicking his phone shut as he walked back toward us, in the direction of the house. “A break in a case.”

“My son, the detective,” his proud mother said.

“Is this about the murder?” I asked.

“Or the jewelry-store robbery?” Beverly asked.

“Was there a shoot-out?” Maddie wanted to know.

Skip laughed at the enthusiasm his call aroused. He rubbed Maddie’s red curls. “Maybe there’ll be another cop in the family,” he said. Her response was a wide grin. As much as I appreciated the law-enforcement profession, I’d been picturing Maddie as a doctor, like her father, or an artist, like her mother. If she was enamored of law enforcement, she could be a Supreme Court justice, but not patrolling the streets with a baton and gun, thank you. Not to worry, if she was like most kids, many ideas would come and go in the next few years.

“I can’t say much right now,” Skip said.

“I heard they took only the cash and some of the less expensive pieces,” Beverly said, pursuing the jewelry track. “Crane is lucky they left the good stuff, though they did get away with something like fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Wow, fifteen grand.” Maddie whistled through a (happily) food-free mouth. “Any suspects?”

Another resolution: to monitor my granddaughter’s television viewing more closely.

Skip caught my eye, and addressed me instead of his tiny interrogator. “Maybe a suspect.” When he saw that Beverly and Maddie had left the table, distracted by a visit from June’s cat (not needing a crate to overcome the fence), he leaned over and whispered, “Well, you’ll find this out soon enough, Aunt Gerry. We think Jason Reed was involved.”

A ripple went through me and the whole backyard shifted. “Jason? Involved in the murder?” I pointed to Skip’s cell phone, as if a corpse lay there on the touch pad.

“No, no. Not in the murder. In the burglary.” Skip had his keys out.

I sat back, took a deep breath and a long sip of red wine. Linda didn’t have a murder to worry about, at least. There had already been rumors about Jason and the burglary, but I’d been hoping they were just that, rumors. I felt so sorry for Jason. And for Linda. She’d always wanted a family and adopted Jason late in her life, when she was forty-three and Jason was about three and a half years old. She did this without full support from Chuck Reed, her then husband. Linda had pressed the issue. Chuck relented and let Jason take his name, but left them both the following year. Lately, however, Chuck had been spending time with Jason, and Linda wasn’t happy.

“Chuck never spent a minute with Jason when he lived with us and supposedly was his father,” she’d complained recently. “Now he wants to be his buddy.”

“Maybe a father figure is what Jason needs now,” I’d ventured, then realized Chuck might not be the best model for that role. No steady job (currently, he was on the substitute list for when Just Eddie called in sick). A drinking problem, to put it mildly. And then there were those bandannas and belt buckles.

Peter was the ex Linda wished would pay attention to Jason. She’d talked her first husband into taking Jason once a month for bonding, but it wasn’t working out as she’d have liked.

After one such day of togetherness, Peter reported, “The kid hates miniature golf.”

(Occupational hazard—hearing the term
miniature golf
, Linda and I both confessed to picturing a very tiny golf course, on a twelve-inch-square tile, say, or a board with green felt, worked over to resemble turf. The golf ball could be a dried pea, painted white.)

I wasn’t sure Peter was any better a model for Jason, just because he was an affluent career engineer. Peter was a braggart—“the kind of guy, if you’ve got a bottle, he’s got a case,” was Ken’s description.

Thinking of Linda’s life during the years I’d known her, my heart went out to her. She did her best, but it seemed not enough to earn her the happy family life she wanted.

I had one more question for Skip, who had gone into the dining room through the sliding patio door, with me trailing behind.

“Could a kid like Jason pull off something like that burglary by himself?” I asked.

Skip worked his jaw and jingled his keys. He was being overly patient with his nosy aunt, and I worried that he thought I wanted inside information.

“I mean, in general,” I said. Now we were in the atrium, a few steps from the door to the street.

“Not likely,” Skip said. “There’s usually a mentor somewhere in cases like this.” He leaned over, kissed my cheek, and went to work.

I was left pondering this new concept of “mentoring.” I liked it better when it meant tutoring in English or math, or being a role model for a (legal) career.

“Where do you think the 187 happened?” Maddie asked,
long after we thought she’d forgotten about her uncle’s call.

This little girl was too quick a study
, I thought.

“Far away from here, I’m sure,” Beverly said, her long arms flung to their fullest extent.

“It might not even be in Lincoln Point,” I said. “Maybe Uncle Skip is helping out the county, and you know how far that goes.” (I didn’t, but I felt it sounded good.) Beverly and I made a rush to clear the dishes, showing just how casually we were taking this turn of affairs in Lincoln Point.

“It’s not that I’m scared or anything,” Maddie said.

“Of course not.”

That was Beverly and me, in unison.

Our cozy dinner party ended early, not just because of
Skip’s phone call and Maddie’s too-curious state. As much as I wanted to tune into the local news on television and maybe find out more myself about the homicide—murder was very rare in Lincoln Point—I decided I could wait until I read about it in the newspaper. I still had a day to go at the fair, and Beverly had a long, hard day planned at the Oakland Zoo with Maddie.

Beverly’s health was a worry to me. One of her heart valves had been slightly damaged from a strep-throat infection when she was a little older than Maddie. Ken remembered all too many details of the sandpaper rash that seemed to start it all. For the rest of the reading world, scarlet fever was the disease that took the beloved young Beth, in
Little Women
. For the Porter family, it was reality, not fiction.

Even now, every time Beverly was fatigued or complained of joint pain, I saw it as a sign of the disease, though she herself played it down. I’d suggested an activity closer to home than Oakland, but we both knew Maddie had her heart set on a return to the reptile room.

“Don’t worry,” Beverly said. “I’m not going to die on you.”

I hoped not.

“A Ramona book,” Maddie said when I asked her reading
choice for the night.

We curled up on the bed in her father’s room and delved into the boisterous, slightly rebellious Ramona Quimby’s first day of a new school year. Quite a switch from the little girl whose daytime vocabulary included phrases like
chick magnet
and
fifteen grand
. I remembered the same back-and-forth behavior from Richard at that age. One moment he was The Too-Big-Now Kid, refusing to kiss his parents in front of his friends; the next he was hanging on to me or wanting one of us to stay by his bed until he fell asleep.

A girl after her English teacher grandmother’s heart, Maddie had filled an entire tote bag with books for her trip. I was glad to see that the number of knock-knock joke books was down from last year.

My mind was only partly on Ramona’s nemesis, Yard Ape, and whether he would dip her pigtails in the inkwell, or whatever the modern-day version was. (Dunking her cell phone into an oversize drink cup? Rubbing her iPod in a handful of neon green gunk?)

Most of my attention was on Linda’s plight. I never thought of myself as having a great imagination. I preferred to enjoy other people’s stories and poems. Yet now my brain seemed to be working overtime, creating links between Jason’s alleged burglary and Linda’s Friday evening/Saturday morning trouble.

What if Jason’s mentor, as Skip called him, had abducted Linda and left her at that pay phone? A possible reason eluded me, but my number-one candidate wore an elaborate belt buckle and cowboy boots and drove a red sports car probably only 2 percent his, 98 percent some creditor’s. On the other hand, I couldn’t guess why Chuck would behave so dramatically with Linda. He seemed happy enough just to hassle her in the usual ways.

At eleven o’clock the phone by my bed rang. Linda’s home phone number showed in my little ID box. I grabbed the receiver before the noise could wake Maddie, I hoped.

Once again I heard a voice in trouble. “The police think Jason robbed Crane’s,” Linda said.