Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

I was almost surprised to hear the voice of the grown-up Skip as he addressed me now, back at the table, notebook and pen ready.

“This is what happens sometimes when there’s questionable jurisdiction at the beginning. I hate to say it, but now and then things fall through the cracks.”

It bothered me that a murderer might go free because of a breach of continuity in an investigation from one city to another less than an hour away. It didn’t seem a very thorough way to do police business, but I resisted complaining to Skip. I knew his job was hard enough.

“And when it’s early in a case, no one knows exactly what will matter in the end and we try to cover all bases,” Skip continued, while I pondered my next move.

“Can’t you go to San Francisco and find out more about this maintenance supervisor, Ben Dobson? It’s peculiar that one minute he’s fighting with the victim, and the next he quits on the spot.” I thought back to my own inability to get anything out of Mike the electrician and only the vaguest mention of Ben’s temperament from Enrico the plumber.

“How do you know he was a supervisor?”

“My toilet got stopped up,” I said.

Skip gave me a confused look, then laughed as if I’d told a joke. I let it go at that.

It was time I came through for my nephew, and did something that would benefit Rosie also. The sooner Rosie showed up for the police, the sooner we could get to the bottom of the case and clear her. It wasn’t as if Rosie were doing any good out there, now technically in the wind, since neither Linda nor I knew where she was holing up. She wasn’t in any shape to investigate on her own, but maybe the police would get a tidbit from her that would help.

I decided to come clean (almost) about my recent brushes with assault, in case there might be a useful tidbit buried in the incidents.

Skip jotted notes and kept any responses to himself while I talked. I described Walter Mellace’s stopping me aggressively in the hallway. I was a little vague on the timeline and on what you might call… ahem… trespassing, but I had the feeling Skip was able to put it all together nicely. He remained surprisingly restrained.

“Doesn’t that sound like you should look at those RFPs and why Callahan and Savage gets the short end all the time?” I asked.

Skip nodded. “I already put someone on that. It turns out that Bridges did have decision-making power on that stuff. He was only one vote on the hotel’s executive committee, but when it came to anything related to maintenance or upgrades, they essentially followed his recommendation.”

“There’s more.” I braced myself for the purse-snatching story. “But it’s probably completely unrelated,” I began. By the time I got to the act of theft itself, however, Skip had dropped his pen and his eyes had widened. I feared he was going to call an ambulance.

“Did you report this?” he asked. Why not to me? was in his voice.

“Yes, yes, and I didn’t lose anything.” I thought of Big Blue with his crooked nose and gentle manner. “They took all the information, and I got my purse back, but no one expects the thief to be caught. I’m telling you this because I think it’s possible that he was also looking for something I might have found in David’s room.”

Skip relaxed, realizing I guessed, that since I had no visible bruises, there was nothing to worry about. I waited while he doodled and wrote a few notes.

Our session would have to come to a close soon. David’s memorial was at ten at Miller’s Mortuary, near the main commercial district of Lincoln Point.

I wanted to leave Skip with a final thought before he considered handcuffs, for Rosie or for me. Fortunately he never pushed me on how, when, or why I got into David’s room.

“Rosie isn’t capable of murder,” I said, my final word as I got up to clear the table.

Skip looked at me, a mixture of sadness and frustration in his expression. “Have a seat, Aunt Gerry.”

I sat. “What?” I knew that nothing good could come from his tone. I sipped my coffee.

“I didn’t want to be too graphic before, but you ought to know this.” He took a breath. “About what the killer did to David’s body.”

“Do I need to hear this?”

“I think so. David Bridges’s lips were glued shut, Aunt Gerry. That’s the glue we matched to the pieces in the mini box.”

It took a few seconds to register, then I grasped the edge of the table and hung my head. My breath felt heavy in my lungs. I fought down an acidy taste in my mouth. The last mouthful of coffee now seemed like a big mistake.

I had a flashback to my conversation with Linda-I’d interrupted her when she tried to describe what an indiscreet EMT friend had told her.

I pictured David’s lips…

“Excuse me,” I said and headed for my bathroom.

Who could do such a thing? I didn’t for a minute think that a miniaturist could use her craft in such a horrible way. Certainly not one who came to my house once a week for an uplifting evening of shared creativity. Although in Skip’s mind, the awful detail was further proof of Rosie’s guilt, to me it was the clearest sign that Rosie had been framed.

Miniaturists treasured their craft, the fruits of their labor, even their glue. I tried to hold fast to this belief even as the awful image flooded my mind-a vandalized room box with hateful words, destroyed property, and a tiny bottle of poison.

To some it might seem disrespectful, but I planned to take full advantage of the memorial service for David Bridges, using it as a tool to make progress in finding his killer. From what I’d heard from Skip, I wasn’t convinced the police would do anything but settle on Rosie.

My views might have come from too much exposure to television dramas (though real-life drama seemed to have taken over my time lately), but I believed that David’s killer would show up for this service. Moreover, if he was from out of town, this might be my last chance to have a close look and a talk with him. Or her.

As I got ready for my visit to Miller’s Mortuary, deciding to wear a jacket in spite of the heat, I made a mental list of whom to look for and try to console.

In my mind, the Mellaces were the prime suspects. Walter’s motivation could be simply that he’d found out about David and his wife, who seemed to have enjoyed at least one exclusive party together, if not a longer-term arrangement.

Cheryl’s motivation, according to self-appointed Detective Gerry Porter, could be that she became uncontrollably upset when David rejected her offer to leave her husband for him. I worked out a standard scenario in Movies of the Week: now that her children are grown and out on their own, Cheryl can be with David as she’s wanted since high school. But David never intended to be committed to her in that way; he was never serious about her.

I wasn’t sure how Cheryl managed to carry the trophy from San Francisco to Lincoln Point or lift it high enough to kill David, but I had to leave something for the police to figure out.

I found myself casting the movie version of the triangle, with perhaps the petite Holly Hunter playing Cheryl.

David’s fictional rejection of Cheryl loomed larger and was more of an issue in my mind than his real rejection of Rosie, which I’d seen with my own eyes. My mind was a marvel. “Anyone but Rosie Norman” was its theme.

I wished I were confident in my ability to recognize Ben Dobson without his gray jumpsuit. I had no idea where he lived but guessed it was San Francisco. Maybe there would be a revealing decal on his car: A monk in a habit and the words Duns Scotus Supervisor . It was possible that Ben wouldn’t come to this unofficial service, however, in which case I’d have to nab him at the funeral on Saturday at St. Bridget’s, assuming he’d go to that. I hoped the case would be solved by then. I had a life to get back to. Sort of.