Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

Once again, I couldn’t disagree, so I simply uttered a sound between a cough and a grunt.

Rosie wasn’t finished reliving the traumatic episode. “Cheryl grabbed the room box from my hands. Roughly, Gerry. She started to pull at the pieces, but you know how carefully I attach everything. She was getting frustrated and finally she was strong enough to deflate that football I made out of leather.”

Linda came back with another pitcher of ice tea and lemonade, just in time to hear Rosie finish her story.

“I was so mad I hauled off and hit her in the face with my purse. I didn’t even care that the scene fell to the floor.”

Linda stopped in her tracks. “I guess I missed a lot.” An eye patch zoomed into focus on the white wall of the Mary Todd guest room. “Did you injure her?”

“She was bleeding, from her forehead, I think. I guess the heavy rhinestone buckle on my purse caught her in the wrong place. She started to scream, but we couldn’t exactly yell at each other in the middle of the night in the hotel hallway. She just whispered something very crude and ran back to David’s room.”

“And you?”

“I waited… not long… and finally decided it was no use. The great David Bridges didn’t care about me thirty years ago, and he never would.”

“The room box?”

“I just picked it up and took it back to our room. Some things were broken, but I didn’t care.”

Rosie seemed to collapse on the straight-back chair, as if she had just entered room five sixty-eight at the Duns Scotus and flopped on the bed next to me.

Was this the point where an LPPD interrogator would apply further pressure, taking advantage of her exhausted state?

I had question after question on the tip of my tongue. If she never entered David’s room, how did she explain the presence of the tiny oval mirror from the door of the locker? And what was the meaning of the trashed room box? Although Skip hadn’t told me where or how the police had found the piece, I knew the ugly changes-the graffiti and the bottle of poison-were certainly made by the hand of a miniaturist. I could simply ask Rosie where she thought the scene was now, but my mind was in a spin trying to figure out what to settle first.

I was eager to know if Rosie was aware that it had been Barry Cannon who sent her the chocolates, and probably all of the other presents, and not David. If so, did that make her angry? How angry?

A cop would know the right order to pursue these questions.

“Rosie, you need to talk to the police,” I said, not for the first time since I’d entered the room.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Here’s where I should deny the suspect water or a chance to visit the bathroom. I looked at my friend, ragged and vulnerable, and threw back my shoulders.

“Let’s take a break,” I said. “Have some more ice tea, Rosie.”

When Maddie’s call came in on my cell phone, I was alone in the tiny bedroom. Rosie was in the bathroom; Linda was back on the floor, as she termed it, with patients.

“Where are you, Grandma?” Maddie asked.

“I-”

“No, wait. Let me guess. You’re doing er-r-r-rrands.”

I smiled at the way she stretched out the word, rolling the r ’s as if she were practicing a romance language. I couldn’t deny my overuse of the word, whenever I was looking into matters I thought too risky for Maddie’s involvement.

“Are you having a good time with Aunt Beverly?”

“Uh-huh. And with Uncle Nick.”

Nice for all. I was just getting used to Nick’s being part of the family. Beverly had met him in her work as a civilian volunteer for the LPPD and they now seemed to be inseparable. She’d been a widow much longer than I had, since Skip was only eleven years old. On days when I wasn’t completely selfish, I was happy for her.

“And Uncle Skip is here,” Maddie said.

Not so nice. I had a reaction similar to the one I’d have if I were cruising down the 101 and saw the black-and-white California Highway Patrol car in my rearview mirror, even if I wasn’t exceeding sixty-five miles an hour.

“How’s the pool?” I asked Maddie.

Maddie laughed. “No stalling around, Grandma. Uncle Skip wants to talk to you.”

The odds seemed stacked against me. My Nancy Drew granddaughter, my homicide detective nephew, and retired homicide detective Nick Marcus were all at the other end of the phone line. Not a line, exactly, since it was cell phone to cell phone. Maybe an electric wave of some kind.

In any case, this time I was speeding.

In the approximately ten seconds it took for Skip to assume control of the phone at Beverly’s house, I ran through my options for truth or consequences. What if he asked whether I knew where Rosie was? How could I get around that? I could use his technique and ask another question. I could-

“Is Rosie Norman with you?” Skip asked, without prelude.

I swallowed hard. Then, aha! I heard water running in the bathroom, behind a closed door. “No,” I said, with the ease of the just.

“If you find her, will you advise her to come in immediately?”

“Of course,” I said with great confidence. No lies so far. If he’d phrased his question as “Do you know where she is?” I’d have been stuck. I couldn’t believe my luck. And it was my turn. “Is Rosie a fugitive from justice?”

“Technically, no.”

Whew. I was home free. “When can I talk to you?”

“Besides right now on the phone?”

“Yes.” (Because the water had stopped running and technically, I would be with Rosie in about one minute.)

“I’ll meet you at my office in ten,” he said.

“How about twenty? And, Skip, can you leave-”

“Without the redheaded squirt.”

“You mean the other redheaded squirt.”

I was glad we were a close family.

I knew the LPPD would be looking to make an arrest soon, partly to give David’s family some comfort as the time for his memorial approached. The sooner Rosie talked to them, the better.

My strategy with Rosie hadn’t worked so far; I had to try a new tack that I hoped wouldn’t upset Linda even more than she was already. Maddie’s term “freaked out” came to mind, and I had to say, though I admired and taught proper English, that some of my granddaughter’s current favorite expressions had more impact than the classics.

“Rosie, you know Linda’s job is on the line here, if not worse.” I didn’t mention that I was prepared to take the full blame, telling whoever needed to know that I’d forced Linda into this position, on threat of… something. I’d work it out.

As I feared, Linda gasped. She had a habit in times like this of grabbing the front of her uniform, already stretched across her full bosom, as if she were having a heart attack. Before she lost her composure completely, I told her that I had it on good authority that, technically, she was not harboring a fugitive.

“But you might be one soon, Rosie. The longer you put this off, the more guilty you look. I’m going downtown to talk to Skip, to clear the way for you, but you have to promise me that you’ll go to the station and talk to him before the day is over.”

Rosie nodded, her sad eyes drooping.

“Now, I have only a few minutes to clear up some things.” I dug in my tote and fished out the tiny mirror, which I’d wrapped in tissue, having thought of preserving fingerprints only after it was too late. “No beating around the bush, Rosie. I found this in David’s room on Saturday afternoon.”

Rosie took the mirror between her thumb and index finger. Neither she nor Linda asked what I’d been doing in the murdered man’s hotel suite. Apparently my friends took my investigative privileges for granted. Rosie peered closely at the mirror. The shiny gold edge seemed to blink on and off as it caught the late afternoon sun, now directly, now through a waving tree branch. She squinted, missing her magnifier, I was sure. I had one in my tote but decided against offering it to her. Either Rosie knew where the mirror had come from or she didn’t. It didn’t take close scrutiny for her to figure it out.