Murder in Miniature (7 page)

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I wasn’t surprised. “That’s awful, Linda. Did they arrest him?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, sounding as if that were the most preposterous idea she’d heard since someone suggested she spray paint her fine furniture pieces. “He’s right here. In bed.”

I bit my lip and rolled my eyes to the ceiling, tempted to hang up and unplug my phone. Instead, my pushover personality kicked in. “Do you want to come by for coffee?”

“Okay, if you want me to.” That was Linda, making the whole thing my idea.

“Of course,” I said.

It wasn’t two in the morning at least, and it wasn’t from a pay phone in the hinterlands. And I didn’t even have to leave my home.

Things were looking up.

Crafts fair weekends always tired me out, even when all
I had to worry about was smiling a lot, and keeping inventory on hand and my thermos filled. This weekend was over the top, however, with two nearly sleepless nights and the added responsibility of making sure Maddie was taken care of, and—very important—that she was spared the drama in the lives of her grandmother’s friends.

At just after midnight, I poured second cups of coffee for Linda and me. We sat in the atrium, the heart of the house, where I kept a cozy arrangement of two chairs and a small table. I’d thrown a light robe over my mismatched cotton pajamas. Linda, who’d spent most of the evening at the police station, was in her crafts fair sweats, dusty rose this time. Her face was splotchy, her blue mascara streaked, and her hair limp. Nothing worse than a limp upsweep, but I didn’t tell her that.

She’d briefed me on Jason’s grueling experience “under the lights,” as she called the interview.

“They treated my son like a criminal,” she said in summary. “All they have is that he skipped school that morning and the newsstand guy—Armando or Alonzo or something—may have seen him near Crane’s. Someone who doesn’t even speak English right, Gerry. The police don’t like Jason much.”

“He
has
kept the police busy, with—”

“With what? You know he didn’t do half the things he’s accused of. Sometimes he falls in with the wrong crowd. He’s a very impressionable boy.”

The inconsistencies made my late-night head spin. He didn’t do it, but if he did, it wasn’t his fault. There wasn’t a witness, but if there was, English was not his first language. It sounded like lawyer talk, which also made my head spin.

“I understand,” I said.

“I think Chuck is involved. The police said he had a solid alibi for last Tuesday, the day of the robbery. But get this: evidently he started drinking early that day and was playing pool with his buddies. The bartender—you know, that loser Tom Baker—and four other upstanding citizens of Lincoln Point vouched for him.” Linda took a cookie from the plate between us. “Yeah, right. A tight alibi. Anyway, Jason’s fine for right now, until they decide they have something else on him, I guess.” She took a breath. “But I’m all stressed out, and there was just no one else for me to turn to.”

“Turn to for what, Linda? You’re not exactly opening up to me.” The delicate sounds from the waterdrop fountain in the corner of the atrium reminded me to breathe, to calm myself. Water poured from the uppermost vessel down to each of three others, in the aqueduct style that Ken loved, and cycled back to the top. I focused on lowering my voice—Maddie was only one room away. “What happened last night?” I whispered.

Linda folded her arms and blew out a breath, as if she’d just taken a drag on a cigarette, which would have been the case not too many years ago. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, Gerry. Just be patient with me. I think it’s all going to be over soon.”

“And what might
it
be?” I asked.

Linda glared at me, as she often did when I pressed her for what she didn’t want to give up. But this was my home, my coffee, and my sleep time that was dwindling away. I picked up my mug, nearly full, and carried it to the kitchen. I slammed the mug into the sink, making as much noise as I could without breaking it.

“I just wanted to see a friendly face, Gerry. Which I’m not getting. I guess I’d better go,” Linda said. Her voice was huffy, which aggravated me more.

“I guess so.”

Linda threw her purse over her shoulder and headed for door. She left her mug on the table.

I should have been relieved, but the feeling was more complicated than that. I thought of myself as a good friend. Maybe really good friends don’t ask questions. Maybe the trendy, “I’m here for you,” is what I should be willing to give, no matter how little I got in return.

It was too late and I was too tired to decide. In just a few hours I’d see Linda at the fair and apologize for essentially kicking her out of my house.

I locked the front door after her and stopped by Maddie’s room. She was sprawled on her stomach, covers on the floor. Her left hand clutched something I couldn’t make out. I moved closer and strained to see it by the moonlight streaming through the window.

She was holding two small pieces of foam board, the raw materials I’d pointed out to her for a bookcase in the Bronx apartment dollhouse. I could see that the edges were mangled, probably sticky with glue from her attempts to form a shelf. The room was warm, but still I covered her with the baseball-design afghan I’d knitted for her father many years ago. I kissed her forehead and slipped out.

I sat in front of my waterdrop fountain for a long time.

The fair was scheduled for only five hours on Sunday,
ten to three. I hoped I could make it through without nodding off in front of a buyer. I made a quick plan. Beverly and Maddie wouldn’t get home from the zoo until six or so. If I played it right, I could pack up my goods, help Just Eddie put the hall back to its normal configuration (his generosity in working on Sunday extended just so far), and be home by four thirty for a nap.

First, however, there were those five hours.

By the second hour of the fair, about eleven in the morning, everyone—vendors and customers alike—was talking about “The Murder.” So much for Skip’s admonition to keep quiet. Someone had not been so obedient as Beverly and I had. Not surprising that the word had spread. Violent crime was a rarity in Lincoln Point—the only murder I could remember was years ago, that of a seasoned criminal, whom the good citizens of the town seemed happy to be rid of. This new murder was big news.

The buzz filled the room as each new group entered the hall with more alleged information. The consensus was that the victim was an unidentified white woman, small frame, early thirties. One crafter said she’d heard the victim was shot, another that she’d been strangled. One customer surmised that she was a “working girl” who’d wandered over the line from the next town to the south, another that she was a drifter from the next town to the north.

Jim Quinlan, husband of Mabel, the Queen of Beads, came in all flustered, waving a copy of our local weekly newspaper, the
Lincolnite
, a morning paper put out by our editor who was also our minister.

We heard Jim’s voice all the way in the back of the room. “Can you believe this? Mabel and I drove by that very spot not two days ago,” he said, as if they’d been in imminent danger, and were still.

I paid only sight attention to the chatter while I surreptitiously started to pack a few of my items in preparation for closing the fair. Surely I wouldn’t sell more than one or two more knickknack shelves made from multiblade razor cartridges in the next few hours.

The news flowed past.

“I heard she had several different IDs on her.”

“No, the paper said she had no ID.”

“The cops are not telling us everything.”

“They never do.”

“Was she naked?”

“She was wearing a Raiders jacket.”

“Where was the body found, anyway?”

Then Jim. The voice of authority, since he was holding the newspaper. “I told you, we just passed by there on our way to visit our grandson. The body was behind a gas station somewhere on 101, near the off-ramp to 87.”

My heart skipped. I looked up at Jim, now walking away from my corner. Done with parading his story, he was heading back to his wife’s table at the front of the hall.

I left a customer midsentence, with a quick
’scuse me
, and walked into the aisle. I caught up with Jim and kept pace with him toward Table 8. Not too difficult since Jim was older than Mabel, who’d admitted to eighty-one last year, then seventy-nine this year.

I steadied my breathing. “Are you sure about the location, Jim? How do you know exactly where the woman was found?” I asked him. I had to bend a bit to speak into Jim’s ear. I thought I remembered a time when he was taller than me.

Jim slapped his hand on the paper, its headlines barking the story of the day. “It says so, right here. Do you know we almost stopped for gas at that station?”

“No, we didn’t, dear. That station isn’t even in business,” Mabel said. We’d arrived at the bead table and I was momentarily distracted by yet another new item, a pair of tiny red pumps made out of Czech glass beads. “You’re thinking about another ramp, the one at the 880 interchange.”

“No, sweetheart, remember…”

I assumed Mabel and Jim had had a lot of practice working out differences like this, and didn’t need my help. I took the opportunity to slip the newspaper from Jim’s veiny hand. I sat on a chair in the dining area immediately neighboring Mabel’s post and skimmed the story for salient features. The victim was indeed female, Caucasian, early thirties, and apparently not a local. A passing trucker had found her in the wee hours of Saturday morning. She’d been shot in the head and in the chest. It was not known yet how long the body had been there, but it seemed likely that the crime had taken place within a couple of hours of the trucker’s finding her.

Reverend and Editor Stuart Edson had been kind enough to include a map with the article. I swallowed hard at the large X at the intersection of highways 101 and 87. One could get off many rounds of ammunition, I thought, before anyone would hear the shots in that neighborhood.

Though there was no detail on the newspaper map, I saw clearly the gas station, the deserted pumps, the pay phone. I saw my friend Linda, too, and tried desperately not to put a gun in her hand.

Mostly, I saw Maddie, in my backseat, sleeping as if she didn’t have a care or a worry in the world. Now, it turns out that she was at the crime scene.

Tallying the votes for the dollhouse contest took longer
than I thought, my distracted state being one of the reasons. I couldn’t get the image of the
Lincolnite
X from my mind. I knew I had to say something to Skip eventually. But for now, I had to judge a dollhouse contest. It’s not that you’re withholding evidence, I told myself. Then gulped hard.

The group of judges I’d recruited, some crafters, some not, took their time, examining details carefully, grading on the basis of workmanship, originality, and a vaguely defined aesthetic appeal. I noticed that Linda’s entry, an American colonial, was still minus its Governor Winthrop desk (I was almost beyond caring). We were ready with our results by one o’clock, only a little later than we’d planned. I took control of the PA system to announce the winner.

“Rosemary Hayes,” I squawked. Thunderous applause greeted the mother of five-year-old twins who had found time to build and decorate a dollhouse. A sign of the times, in a good way, I thought: the winning dollhouse was “green.” Rosemary had built a modern eight-room home constructed of soft wood and other earth-friendly materials, with replicas of solar panels on the roof. The walls were modular, slipping in and out of tracks, which allowed many different configurations of rooms. Lighting was meant to be natural, and many of the details were created from found objects, including an extensive use of game pieces. The prize was a generous gift certificate to a crafts store.

For as long as I could remember, the runner-up was always one form or another of a Lincoln-log cabin, this year’s from Mabel’s great-granddaughter. The young woman had re-created in full scale the cabin built by Abe and his father in Illinois in 1831.

When the applause died down, I was back at my table, exhausted, holding my head up with my hands. I snapped up when one of my former students stopped by. She brightened my day, except for the fact that her impending motherhood made me feel old.

“Mrs. Porter. Remember me? Melissa Consuelos? Well, now Melissa Fox.” She pointed to her wedding ring and to her extended belly. “I thought I’d run into you here. I still remember that miniature scene you made while we were reading
Brideshead Revisited
. The ballroom?”

“Of course. I’m so glad you liked it.” I’d spent a lot of time reproducing the ballroom of the stately Brideshead Castle—constructing chandeliers of tiny crystal beads and gilding pieces of foil to look like ornate mirrors.

Melissa held up a basket of purchases from the fair, mostly raw materials like balsa wood, small clamps, and paints. “That’s what inspired me to be a miniaturist myself,” she said.

“Wonderful.” I hoped I’d also inspired her to read.

The time never seemed right for me to say anything to Linda, seated next to me at Table 30. But, I realized, the tension wasn’t that much greater than it usually was when Linda was in a snit for one reason or another: I didn’t invite her to coffee with Karen and Gail; I wanted to stop sharing birthday gifts, but I still shared with Beverly; I neglected to let her know of the sale at Joann’s in the strip mall downtown (whereas, I
had
called Betty and told her about it).

I had a headache from imagined calls to Skip, calls I was able to talk myself out of until after the fair.

At one point, I came back from the restroom to see Dudley Crane, the wronged jeweler himself, talking to Jack Wilson, Gail (Split-level Ranch) Musgrave’s brother and a candidate for office against Dudley. Whereas Postmaster Cooney was Dudley’s pesky, verbally abusive opponent, Jack was the real threat, running for office himself.