Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

Miller’s employees were easy to pick out, even among so many men wearing black. They stood at the edges of the crowd, hands behind their backs, earpieces showing. I wondered if they’d been alerted that there might be an arrest on their property this morning.

Barry and I arrived at the doorway together. I was ready.

“How are you holding up, Barry?” I asked him. I expected him to tell me he had an upset stomach. His wouldn’t be the first Scrap’s casualty I’d heard of.

“I’m doing okay, Mrs. Porter. I still can’t believe he’s gone.” Barry seemed genuinely upset, his shoulders slumped and his lips in a downward arc. That could have been from remorse as much as from the grief of an innocent man, I reminded myself. “We go way back, you know. All the way to grade school.”

“And you still had business dealings with him, didn’t you?”

“Sort of.”

I feigned surprise. “I thought it was more than ‘sort of.’ You work for Mellace Construction, right?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve been there a long time.”

“And your company has received a number of contracts lately for work at the Duns Scotus, hasn’t it?” Barry opened his mouth to answer, but I ran on, intending to provoke him if possible. “Networking with friends is always a plus, isn’t it? I mean, for mutual benefit.” I held back on winking, hoping the inflection in my voice carried the message.

Barry squinted at me, as if he was having trouble making the shift to the new topic and to the sarcastic tone of his former, reserved English teacher. “You’ll have to pardon me if business isn’t the first thing on my mind right now,” he said.

“I understand, Barry. I just want to make sense of what happened to David and to figure out who could have done this terrible thing. I’m trying to think of why anyone might want to kill your friend and business colleague.”

It seemed to take a minute for Barry to digest what I was saying. He straightened his shoulders, which kept him still shorter than me, however. “With all due respect, Mrs. Porter, this is probably not the best time for a conversation like this.”

“You’re right. But I value your input, Barry. I wanted to get your opinion also on who might have been sending presents to Rosie Norman, using David’s name.”

Barry’s lips tightened, in anger, I thought, not in sadness this time. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m referring to candy, flowers, a bracelet.” I let that sink in. “Can we set a time to meet?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so.” Barry tugged on his suit jacket, gave his neck a brief roll, and walked away.

On the whole, I wasn’t proud of my first interview. Barry’s response left me as suspicious of him as I had been since Samantha identified him from his updated yearbook photo.

If one of David’s best friends was innocent, however, I’d just done a rude, heartless thing.

The tables were turned during my second try at information gathering, this time with Cheryl Mellace. Walter had evidently had enough of me in San Francisco: as I approached, he turned his back and busied himself serving punch to guests who’d lined up.

“I know how close you both were to David,” I said to Cheryl, with a tsk-tsk sound. It occurred to me that I’d already used that line on her, but if she was guilty it might just make her nervous, which might prove to be a good thing.

Walter kept his back to me, ladling a very pink punch into glass cups, engaged in chatter with a couple I didn’t know but recognized from the cocktail party and banquet.

Cheryl yanked on my arm with what felt curiously like a pinch, through my beige-and-white seersucker jacket. A mild pain ran along my upper arm. She pulled me to the side.

“Listen, Mrs. Porter. You’re not my teacher anymore, okay? And I don’t need you sniffing around or whatever it is you’re doing.” Cheryl’s eyes darted from me to her husband, still working intensely, like hired help, at the punch bowl. “I know Rosie was always your favorite pet and you’re trying to pin this on someone else. But just face it. She did it. I saw that stupid little dollhouse thing she made. She had it while she was stalking David in the hallway on Friday night. And she all but confessed when she wrote all over that thing and destroyed it.”

I bristled at “stupid little dollhouse thing,” but kept my cool. “I thought you were the one who destroyed it,” I said.

“I’m not the one the police are questioning. The police have their ducks in a row; they pulled her out of a hat, not me.”

Cheryl never was any good at figures of speech. By the time I untangled the message enough to ask what she meant, how she knew the police had questioned Rosie (had they?), she’d walked away, the sound of her high heels ringing out on the hardwood floor.

I was left convinced that a woman who called a room box a “dollhouse thing” was capable of murder and deserved her high place on my list of prime suspects.

Two lines had formed in the room, one for the buffet table and one that ended at a couple who looked bereaved enough to be David’s parents. I saw no sign of a man young enough to be David’s son, but perhaps he would make an appearance at St. Bridget’s on Saturday.

I clicked my phone back on, in case there was breaking news from Rosie, Linda, or Skip. I was concerned that I hadn’t seen Rosie, though that didn’t mean she wasn’t present in the crowd.

Before I could decide which line to join first, I saw another attraction-standing by himself looking as though he didn’t know anyone in the room, was Duns Scotus maintenance supervisor Ben Dobson. I was 95 percent certain it was Ben, especially when I caught him in profile. Ben had an unusually large, hooked nose, all the more pronounced on his small frame. I edged closer on the pretext of getting into the Bridgeses’ reception line. I needed another view of him to be sure this was the employee who’d argued with his boss, David Bridges, on the night before he was murdered.

I moved ahead in the line of people waiting to offer sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. Bridges, all the while keeping my eyes on the man I was increasingly sure was Ben Dobson. When I left my house I knew it might come to this-disrespect of a solemn occasion for the sake of an investigation. I hoped it didn’t show.

I was framing an opening line for Ben, hoping to do better than I had with my approach to Barry, when I heard, “May I join you?” I hadn’t noticed that Henry was several people ahead of me in line. He had left his place and walked back to greet me.

I started to answer Henry when a call came in on my cell phone and Ben Dobson left his post. I almost lost track of Ben. My abilities were strained by the need to triple-task.

“Hi, Henry,” I said, clicking on my phone and watching Ben over Henry’s shoulder. My height made it slightly easier to accomplish all of this.

“Go ahead and take that call,” Henry said.

“Do you mind? I’ll just step over here for a minute.”

Henry left the line also and stood far enough away to give me privacy. “I’ll wait,” he said.

I wished it were Ben who’d said he’d wait. I could see him survey the crowd, much the same way Rosie had at the cocktail party. Was he also looking for an old flame as she had been? I doubted it.

Worse luck, Ben Dobson was now headed toward the exit door. I glanced at my caller ID. Linda. One of a very short list of people whose calls I felt necessary to answer today.

I smiled at Henry, picked up Ben’s retreating back, and clicked my phone on.

“I didn’t want to interrupt you during the service,” Linda said. “I hope I waited long enough.”

“It’s over. What is it, Linda?” I kept my eyes on Ben. I hoped the urgency I put into my voice would be Linda’s clue not to give me her customary long lead-in to a status report.