7 Madness in Miniature (7 page)

From the way Megan screwed up her mouth, I gathered that she wasn’t a fan of Leo Murray. It was hard to see whom she was a fan of, since Craig’s absence through death didn’t seem to rattle her as it had Catherine. It was possible that she was looking forward to a boss who treated her less like a servant, as I’d witnessed yesterday.

“Have you and Leo worked together a long time?” I asked.

“Me and Leo, no. I’ve worked for Craig forever. Whatever he says, Leo’s not cut out for the business at the level Craig operated on. He’s better off…” Megan stopped and cleared her throat.

“In a small town like this?” I was getting a little tired of New Yorkers, though I used to be one and I loved the city.

“I didn’t mean anything negative, Mrs. Porter. Just”—she stopped and put her hand on the door to Interview Three—“Oh, this is me,” she said. “I’m supposed to wait in here. I already talked to a couple of cops. I don’t know what I can add. I didn’t see Craig after about six o’clock when the meeting broke up. I guess he stayed behind and”—she frowned and shook her head—“you know.”

“And an earthquake hit,” I said. “Were you someplace where you could feel it?” Pretty smooth, if I did say so myself.

“I was back at the hotel, if you can call it that. The KenTucky Inn.” She covered her mouth to stifle laughter. “Sorry, I know it’s all about Abraham Lincoln around here, and I don’t mean to make fun of it, but…”

“We all agree with you on that one,” I said. “It’s the silliest name in the roll books of silly names.” I meant it. Although the innkeepers (a term they preferred to hoteliers), Loretta and Mike Olson, were good friends of mine, I cringed every time I recommended the inn to an out-of-town guest. Apparently they’d told their seven-year-old son that he could name the inn (as luck would have it, at the time his class was reading about the humble birth of Honest Abe in a log cabin in Kentucky) and they felt they had to honor the promise. I didn’t know which was worse, the pun on Lincoln’s birth state or the mid-word uppercase letter. Maybe that’s where SuperKrafts got the idea to come here in the first place. The land of quirky spelling. But the place was close to downtown and charming. And at least for now, it hadn’t been taken over by a chain.

“It was my first earthquake and pretty scary,” Megan continued. “The coffeemaker and the ice bucket shook, and a glass broke.”

“Was Leo with you?”

“No, he stayed behind with Craig. Anyway, he’s in San Jose where Craig was, in a real hotel—oh, there I go again—I mean, a bigger hotel. The guys don’t like small, cozy places. By the way, do you have these earthquakes often?”

“Not as often as the news might lead you to believe.”

“The first one can be unsettling,” Skip chimed in, approaching from behind me.

Megan shuddered, but her simultaneous smile took the edge off her reaction. “You got that right,” she said, and entered the room.

Skip addressed me in a low voice. “Beverly and Maddie are waiting for you in my cubicle.” I supposed it wouldn’t have been cool for him to refer to Bev as “Mom” within earshot of an official witness.

“I’m on my way,” I said. I was tempted to pinch his cheek in retaliation for all the grief he’d given me lately, but lucky for him, I was in an accommodating mood. Also, he slipped into Interview Three to join Megan before I could make my move. Smart guy.

* * *

“We
want to hear everything, Grandma,” Maddie said.

Bev smiled. “
We
certainly do,” she said, emphasizing “we” for Maddie’s benefit.

“Did you mail your letter?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. And Aunt Beverly showed me where they keep all the cars she helps them drag in from the street. They’re not stolen or anything, except some of them might be, but they’re all abandoned. Like, the owner walked away because the engine wouldn’t start, or something. Or sometimes, they’re just lost. Right, Aunt Bev?”

So what if Maddie was avoiding my question. I looked at Bev who gave me a slight nod, which I took to mean that she’d seen the addressee on Maddie’s letter. I’d get the scoop later from my peer. Hooray! Good old (that is, the young bride) Bev, sensing that I’d want to know about the letter without my mentioning it.

Bev glanced at her watch. “It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning, too early for ice cream.”

I thought about my promise to Jeff and my disappointing visit with Bebe. “Who’s up for a video game?” I asked.

* * *

The
light ping of Video Jeff’s door was the same alert he’d always had, left over from before his remodel using SuperKrafts money. Much of the interior was different, though dim light still prevailed. Instead of tripping over boxes and remotes in a cluttered, crowded space, I’d entered a neatly laid-out store. One wall was lined with used games for various brands of equipment; the center of the store held rows of bins with what looked like new shrink-wrapped packages. Jeff had set up monitors with headsets in one corner of the store—the modern version of the pinball machine—and that’s where the wide-eyed Maddie was headed.

Jeff greeted Maddie first. “Hey, Ms. Porter, guess what? You are the one-hundredth person to walk in that door today,” he said.

“One hundred? Already?” Maddie asked.

“You bet,” Jeff answered. “And every day I give a prize to the one-hundredth person.”

I noticed the heads of four young boys turn in our direction, but Jeff ignored them and tended to Maddie. He tore off a receipt slip, the old-fashioned kind that most Springfield Boulevard retailers still used, whether to impress the tourists or to avoid buying and having to learn new equipment, I didn’t know. He wrote on the lined paper: ONE HOUR FREE FOR ANY GAME. At the bottom next to Total, he wrote PAID IN FULL TO 100TH GUEST.

“Wow,” Maddie said, grinning. She thanked Jeff and stood in the middle of the store spinning around to decide which direction she’d run to first. The boys, meanwhile, had returned to their own games. If they wondered about the new hundredth-visitor policy, they didn’t say.

Bev had begged off the field trip to Video Jeff’s. “The life of a civilian volunteer is a hard one,” she’d said. “I have phone duty during the regular girl’s breaks and lunch hour. Who knows what favorite pet has been lost? Or what parking ticket was totally, totally unfair?”

Jeff was left with me and a few intensely occupied teens and preteens. “Bebe throw you out?” Jeff asked.

Wise little brother, I thought. “She’s trying to stay independent, counting on her innocence to bring her home.”

“We all know how well that works,” Jeff said, leading me to wonder if he’d had his own bad experience with the police.

“She looks good,” I lied. “They haven’t charged her, so there’s not much else to do.”

“One of her neighbors called me. The police were at her house with a search warrant. I ran over there, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. Do you think I should get her a lawyer?”

“It couldn’t hurt to have one on standby, just in case.”

“Well, I appreciate you going over there, Mrs. Porter. She sent me away after about two minutes.”
Now, you tell me,
I thought. “I’m sure everyone is always asking you for favors because of…”

I could tell Jeff was embarrassed to admit he was trying to use my connections to the police department to his advantage. I needed to start collecting these admissions and show them to Skip.

“My superior intelligence?” I teased.

Jeff laughed harder than I would have liked. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“How did you fare in the earthquake, by the way? Anything damaged?” I asked.

“No damage, just a lot of fallen boxes.” He pointed to the wall of used games. “But they were a little banged up anyway, so no big deal.”

“Were you in the store at the time?”

“Just closing up.”

While a group of young boys came into the store (no special prize for numbers one hundred and one through one hundred and five), I mentally reviewed the alibis I’d collected unofficially for the time of Craig Palmer’s murder, reciting them to myself in preparation for writing down the list as soon as I could. Catherine and Megan were in their rooms at the KenTucky Inn; Jeff was closing up his shop; Leo was still at the store when Megan left and could have gone to his hotel in San Jose eventually. He also might have killed Craig first, since they’d been the only two left in the building.

How handy for me that I could limit the suspects to a small pool of people. How tough for Skip and the LPPD that they had no such luxury. I imagined a whiteboard in a meeting room at the station with photos of everyone who had crossed paths with Craig Palmer, here, in New York City, in his travels. My head spun. I thought of former girlfriends who might have held a grudge, disgruntled employees, unsatisfied customers of SuperKrafts all over the country, unhappy citizens of Lincoln Point. How far back would investigators have to go to find people with means, motive, and opportunity?

I made a note to ask Skip to keep his promise of details on why Palmer’s death was declared a murder and not an accident. It would have been so much easier if we could simply say, “The earthquake did it.”

I found Maddie, surrounded by several boys, all competing for a score that I was afraid involved a high body count.

“Time to go,” I said, having to use my classroom voice. Loud and authoritative.

“I haven’t used up my hour,” Maddie shouted back.

“There’s no expiration date. You can come back any time,” Jeff said.

Something told me she’d claim every minute of her prize.

Jeff walked us outside. “Sometimes it gets too noisy in there even for me,” he remarked. He looked down Springfield Boulevard, toward the police station, toward the jail. “But I guess it’s better than a lot of places.”

No kidding.

When Sadie’s daughter
showed up to work at eleven she found Maddie, Bev, and me on the bench outside the family-run ice cream shop. “You should have knocked. My mom is in there,” she said, her cherry-colored uniform dress on a hanger, draped over her arm.

But we were comfortable, still not dreadfully hot, and Bev had joined us for wedding talk. Skip was correct in that his mother did seem to be making up for the brief ceremony with his dad. For this wedding, Bev was going all out, with a caterer, a baker (both local independents, she assured us), and about one hundred and fifty guests.

“It was impossible to trim it down,” Bev had said while we were making up the mailing list.

“Between you and Nick, you must know every cop and cop’s wife,” I’d said.

“And every felon and felon’s accomplice,” Bev chuckled. “But don’t worry, I’m seating you and Henry far away from them. By the way, how are you and Henry?”

“We’re both quite healthy, thank you,” I said.

“No, I mean, how are you and Henry?” This time she’d crossed her index and middle fingers, and wore a silly smile above them.

I gave her a silent, silly smile back.

Maddie, sitting between us now, in front of Sadie’s, repeated her assertion that she was too old to be a flower girl and she didn’t want to be a bridesmaid and wear a dress, but she wanted some role in the wedding.

“You can be our photographer,” Bev said.

“Don’t you have a real photographer?” Maddie asked.

“Yes, but he doesn’t know everyone the way you do. He wouldn’t know who’s really important, like your mom and dad, for example.”

“And Grandma.”

Bev slapped her forehead and smiled. “And Grandma. How could I forget Grandma.” I smiled back and bowed from my seated position.

“I can make a movie with my phone,” Maddie said.

“Wow, that would be great,” Bev said. “So we’re all set.”

“What do I have to wear?”

“Well, if you have official duties like taking pictures, who knows what you’ll have to do. You might need to kneel on the grass or climb on something to get a good shot. You can wear whatever you want, but make sure it’s comfortable. Probably a frilly dress wouldn’t be advisable.”

Maddie sat back, her tongue licking her lips. She was having a good day. A trip to the police station, a free pass at Video Jeff’s while all the boys envied her, and now permission to dress casually as an official photographer at her great-aunt’s wedding. To top it off, Sadie pushed through the door.

“We’re open. C’mon in.”

From the way the three of us stampeded to the table, you’d think it had been years since we’d had ice cream.

* * *

As
I’d hoped, Maddie and I had time later for a relaxing crafting session. My main crafts area was the second room from the front of the house, next to Maddie’s bedroom. When it came right down to it, however, every room in my four-bedroom home was a crafts room to some extent. We’d already started on the interior components of the twelve-inch-by-nine-inch ice cream shop that Henry was building for us. Not that we were addicted or anything. Maddie had carefully chosen the flavors—strawberry, chocolate, raspberry ripple, and “just nothing with mint,” she’d said. After a half hour of shaping tiny balls of crafts clay and gluing them into miniature sundae glasses, Maddie made an announcement.

“This is getting boring. I’d rather do an earthquake,” she said.

Maddie still seemed a bit moody, even after her treat-filled morning. Bev and I hadn’t had a private moment to discuss the letter Maddie had mailed, and I wondered if her lingering grouchiness had anything to do with the missive.

“An earthquake? You mean an outdoor scene showing the geological layers?” I hoped not. Too much like a science project.

“No,” she said. “Just a place where there’s been an earthquake with things that fell over.” She’d already told me that she’d considered finishing the ice cream shop, then shaking it as if a seven-point-nine hit it, but decided against wrecking anything that looked like Sadie’s.

We sat on opposite sides of a long table, billed in store catalogs as a picnic table, but the staple of every crafter I knew. The surfaces of the ones I owned were constantly strewn with tiny objects and pieces of indefinable origin destined to be part of a dollhouse or a room box or a free-standing miniature scene. Sometimes an entire row of dollhouses occupied the table, as if I’d created a suburban street in my own home. My greatest pleasure was delivering the houses to a school or hospital for a raffle—or most recently, to SuperKrafts for the charities auction—and then starting all over with new houses. I could see that the ice cream shop was now relegated to the “unfinished” side of the room.

“Let’s brainstorm,” I said, having introduced the concept to Maddie when she was barely able to repeat a two-syllable word.

She closed her eyes, part of our early brainstorming ritual. “Okay.”

“A schoolroom?” I suggested. “A hair salon? A post office?”

She shook her head, no, no, and no. “A swimming pool,” she said. Apparently we hadn’t been brainstorming at all; I’d simply been trying to guess what Maddie had in mind from the start.

I remembered her earlier complaint that she wished she had a pool. I could certainly give her a miniature pool. “A swimming pool hit by an earthquake. We can do it. We can have poolside lounge chairs tipped over,” I said.

“And sodas spilled out.”

“A beach ball that flew into a bush.”

“Some rafts and tubes.”

“A lifeguard chair?” I offered on my next turn.

Maddie shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Is this an indoor pool or an outdoor pool?” I asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You have a particular pool in mind?”

“Nyah. Let’s forget about the pool. How about a police station?”

What?
I looked at her, wishing I could get inside her head the way I’d done when she was a toddler. My family marveled at how I always knew what my little granddaughter wanted. Milk or juice? Sneakers or sandals? A bedtime story from the big blue book or one from the skinny red book? Now at only eleven, she was impossible to read. What would I do next year and those to follow?

“Okay, let’s do a police station,” I said.

“I mean a police station in an earthquake,” she said.

Of course.
“You got it.”

“Do you think it will be too boring?” she asked.

“Not if it’s been hit by an earthquake.”

“I don’t want it to be just desks and chairs.”

“Let’s think of what cute things we can add,” I said. I thought a minute. “Handcuffs. We can make them from jewelry clasps.”

“The silver lobster clasps,” Maddie said, delighted that she remembered the technical name. “They already look just like handcuffs. And we can have, like, a lunch bag, like Uncle Skip has sometimes. He puts his sandwich on top of it when he eats it. We could make a sandwich, easy.” Maddie, who never sat long in one place unless there was a computer in front of her, had left the table and skipped around the room as she brainstormed, ticking off items for consideration. “And a coffee mug. And photos, like the one of June on his desk.”

We were on our way.

We started with a lunch bag. Maddie dashed to the kitchen to get a life-size brown bag, which we then unraveled, as she called it, taking it apart so we could spread it out to see the pattern. She was good at scaling down the shape and making a template for a bag that was one-twelfth scale.

Dum dum, da da dum, da da dum.

I resisted the urge to get off my chair and march around the room with the music. I checked my cell phone screen. Catherine calling. Probably to ask about my brief visit with Bebe.

“Are you in the middle of something, Gerry?” she asked.

I looked at the table, Maddie’s sketch, the scraps of brown paper, and sitting in its cradle, my smoking glue gun. What could Catherine want that would be more important than this? Maddie stared at me, waiting to see what I was going to do and whether she’d be included.

“I am busy, Catherine. Is something wrong?”

“It’s just … I was reading these notes again.” She let out a loud sigh.

I carried the phone out of the crafts room, into my atrium. “Did you get another one?”

“No, but I’m trying to figure out the handwriting. Like, is it a man or a woman? If it’s Bebe, then I’m safe, I guess, now that she’s in custody. But then about a half hour ago someone knocked on my door really hard. I didn’t answer and he went away, but the knocking was, like, angry, and scared me. I was afraid to look through the peephole. I saw this movie where a guy shot someone in the eye, through the hole.” Catherine let out a noise, like a shiver, as if a wind had whipped through her room. “Finally I went to the window and after a couple of minutes I saw Leo’s car drive away. At least, I’m pretty sure it was Leo’s. What if Leo killed Craig? And is sending me notes. Maybe he had another one but he heard me in the room and left?”

“But it wouldn’t make sense for Leo to send you notes telling you to get out of town, would it?”

“I don’t know. I guess not. I’m afraid to leave the room, Gerry.”

I pictured the KenTucky Inn, mentally blocking out the large sign in front. Three floors high, formerly a sprawling private home with expansive lawns that had been replaced by parking lots in the front and back, according to city ordinances.

“How good a look at the car did you get?”

Maddie entered the atrium and flopped onto my lap, as far as her long legs would allow. It was more of a reclining position these days, as if I were her personal poolside lounge chair. Her head rested on my shoulder, a handy spot for a little girl who wanted to eavesdrop on her grandmother’s conversation.

“I got a pretty good look,” Catherine said. “Leo’s rental car is a funny shade of blue. I’m on the third floor in the back with a window onto the parking lot. He drove right under me.” Another shivery noise.

“Have you talked to the police yet?” I asked, leaving off “as I advised.”

She paused. “That’s not the real reason I called, Gerry. I was going to call you anyway. We scheduled a meeting, Leo, Megan, and I, to make some decisions about the Grand Opening. It would be great if you could come.” I noted the swift transition between being afraid to step out of her hotel room to cajoling me into a meeting. “Maisie’s not feeling well and Bebe’s still at the police station and we don’t want to recruit someone new. But we should have at least one community rep.”

“For appearances?” I asked, smoothing Maddie’s red curls.

“Well, sort of, but you know we value your input, Gerry.”

How flattering. “When and where?”

“At the store at three.”

I looked at the nearest wall clock, hanging over my kitchen sink and visible from the atrium. “An hour from now?”

“We’d be really grateful.”

“Isn’t the store still a crime scene?”

“Not as of twenty minutes ago. Jeanine called to say the cops took the tape down. I guess they have all the evidence they need. Or whatever. Anyway, it’s all clear. And Mrs. Porter, I don’t know how you feel about the Grand Opening, given the circumstances, but it doesn’t seem right to me to have a hundred balloons going up right over the spot where Craig was murdered. Not so soon anyway.”

In spite of Catherine’s unsubtle lobbying for my support, I tended to agree with her. Although Craig wasn’t a resident and had spent little more than twenty-four hours alive on Lincoln Point soil, he’d been murdered in our town and it seemed only proper that we respect his memory. Even if someone had traveled from New York to kill him, which, I admitted to myself, was my preferred scenario. And probably the town’s.

I thought about the opportunity to see the recent crime scene, an excuse to be with all three SuperKrafts suspects, as I thought of them, and a chance to help the police close their case and remove Lincoln Point from unwanted attention. “I’ll be there,” I said, as Maddie clapped her hands at the possibility of a field trip.

“Uncle Henry’s or Aunt Beverly’s?” I asked her, meaning, “You’re not invited.”

She hoisted herself off my lap and faced me. “You haven’t told me anything about this case,” she said. “Just because there’s no computer work, it doesn’t mean I can’t help.”

Maddie had a point. Also, it wasn’t fair to exploit her techie talents and cut her out of cases that didn’t require those particular skills. She couldn’t help it that she was eleven years old going on thirty. On the other hand, a person had been murdered in the very building where the meeting would be held. What if the killer returned, or, more likely in my mind, was one of the attendees of the meeting? I didn’t want her there.

“This time I promise to tell you all about the case when I get back.”

“Abso-totally-lutely?” Another linguistic variation from Maddie.

“Abso-blahblahblah-lutely,” I answered.

Earlier, by phone, Henry and I had considered forcing a showdown between his granddaughter and mine. If he happened to be needed to pick up Taylor from her swim party while he happened to be taking care of Maddie, well, whose fault would that happen to be?

“But it’s probably better to let them set the pace,” he’d said.

“Unless it exceeds a statute of limitations. Shall we say a week?”

“A week is good. We have our own convenience to consider,” Henry had said.

We’d hung up on a chuckle.

* * *

Bev,
my accommodating sister-in-law and the bride-to-be, came by in plenty of time for me to make the meeting.

“We might as well stay here,” she said to Maddie. “Your grandma’s fridge and cookie jar are a lot more inviting than mine.”

Until Maddie left the atrium, we chatted about how much time wedding planning takes and what other items we could add to the police station room box. Bev had a wealth of ideas. Maddie drew up a list at this more fruitful brainstorming session as we came up with a magnifying glass, a gun and holster, and three-ring binders, plus everyday desk supplies like telephones, staplers, scissors, and file folders.

“I have an idea,” Maddie said, and skipped away toward the crafts room.