Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

We rose from the couch as she extended her hand. “Marina,” she said. “Like the neighborhood by the bay. But I don’t live there, though.”

“That’s where the World Series earthquake hit,” Maddie said.

I vaguely remembered the popular term for the 1989 quake along the San Andreas Fault. It was the worst in my memory and had been seen around the world because it occurred during a telecast of one of the baseball games in the series. The Marina District had suffered extensive damage, including several fatalities.

Marina addressed Maddie with affection. “You are too little. How do you remember the earthquake?”

“We learned about it in California History class. And I’ve seen videos of the cars that were crushed and the houses that just fell over.”

It was strange to think that Maddie knew of the Loma Prieta earthquake, its official name, only as a fact of history, since it happened nearly ten years before she was born.

Marina seemed very nice and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t left her a gift when I wasn’t trying to bribe her. Too late now.

I handed over one of the Ghirardelli items-a small cable car, about seven inches long, filled with assorted chocolates. “This is for you,” I said.

Her thank-you was so sincere, I hated to go on, but there was work to be done.

“Marina, do you remember seeing a little box with a scene in it? It was in the wastebasket in room five sixty-eight on Saturday morning.”

Marina gave me a confused look and a slow shake of her head.

“There were miniature lockers all along one side of it,” I explained, not willing to give up.

Another head shake. “No, I’m sorry, missus.” Marina’s accent sounded a lot like that of my GED student, Lourdes Pino, and I guessed she had the same Hispanic heritage.

“It was like a little dollhouse,” Maddie said, using her hands to indicate the size.

“Ah, now I remember. Yes, yes. A tiny dollhouse with benches and cabinets.”

That would be it. The child came through again, with a jargon-free description.

“Do you remember what you did with it?” I asked.

“Yes, yes. It was in the wastebasket by the door and it was broken, so I put it in my cart.”

I pictured a large rolling cart (brown?) piled with soft vanilla towels and washcloths, sweet-smelling soap, tiny boxes containing shower caps and shoeshine cloths-and a trashed locker hallway scene with a hate message scrawled in bright red lipstick.

I held my breath. “Where did you take the cart, Marina?”

“I take the cart every day to the basement and we sort out the laundry and replace the little bottles and the other things for the bathroom, and throw away the rubbish.”

I didn’t think I could take another dead end. “That’s it?”

Marina nodded. “Yes, every day. But on Saturday a woman came by while I was outside that room on the fifth floor and she sees the little dollhouse.”

“What did she look like?”

“Very small, with dark hair. And she had a patch over one eye.” Marina covered her own right eye with her hand to illustrate.

A petite brunette with a patch on her eye. How many of those do you see in a day?

“What did the lady want?” I asked, nearly choking from holding my breath.

“She wanted to take the dollhouse. She said it was hers and she threw it away by mistake.” Marina appeared to have a moment of realization. She gasped. “Oh, I’m sorry, missus, I let her take it. Was that a wrong thing to do? Was it yours?”

“Yes, but don’t worry about it.”

Marina seemed unduly upset. “You think I took the money, but I didn’t take it, the money, I swear.”

“She offered you money?”

“Yes, she had money for me, but I said no, it was hers in the first place. Now I see it wasn’t hers. You won’t tell my boss?”

“Of course not, Marina. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve been a huge help to me. Can you answer just one more question?”

“Yes, I try.”

“Do you remember what time it was on Saturday that the woman with the patch on her eye came by?”

Marina smiled and nodded. This one was going to be easy. “I come on for my shift at seven o’clock in the morning and I have my first break at quarter to ten. The lady came just before my break.”

Maddie was taking no chances on my remembering the times. I watched her write them down on the edge of one of the San Francisco tour leaflets. I saw Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter, added to her résumé.

“Thank you so much, Marina.” I reached into my tote. “I have another cable car. Maybe you have a child or a friend who might like it?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Marina not to leave town since she might be called to testify in a murder trial.

We stayed on the couch for a while after Marina left. I called upon my usual hand-waving techniques to explain to Maddie what we’d just learned-that a woman in Rosie’s high school class took the broken locker scene from the hotel room and put it where the man was who had passed away, so it would look like Rosie was guilty.

“A woman with an eye patch framed Mrs. Norman?”

“That’s another way to say it, yes.”

I reminded myself that I couldn’t infer much more-that most likely it was Cheryl who planted the scene and then pointed the police in its direction to frame Rosie. It didn’t mean it was she who had killed David. She was probably outside room five sixty-eight in the first place in order to plant something that would further incriminate Rosie. Seeing the locker room in Marina’s cart must have been serendipity.

Her motivation didn’t have to be to cover up her own guilt, but simply to carry out her vendetta against her competition. Why the beautiful, rich Cheryl Mellace would consider Rosie Norman a threat was beyond me.

I’d quickly worked out the time line in my head. The window for David’s death was between four in the morning and seven thirty when his body was discovered. Cheryl could have done the deed on the early side and still had plenty of time to come back to the Duns Scotus to retrieve the locker room scene.

Now that I thought of it, I’d seen Cheryl coming into the Duns Scotus garage around eight that morning as Maddie and I were leaving. Why else would she have been reentering the hotel? In my mind, I heard her defense attorney ticking off the possible reasons.

Still, all in all, the whole exercise allowed me to keep Cheryl on my list of suspects.

Neither of us wanted to leave San Francisco. On our way from downtown to the bay and back we’d seen a wide variety of architectural choices-Victorian houses, art deco office buildings, and a few modern structures. The international flavor was apparent in the different ethnic groups staying at the hotel, and the many languages we heard at Ghirardelli Square, rivaling what we might have heard on a world cruise.

Most of the time, I loved living in our small, Abraham Lincoln-obsessed town (every day-care child started out learning that he was the tallest president in history, and it took off from there), but once in a while I needed a break and our trips to San Francisco had served the purpose. It wasn’t the city’s fault that the reunion weekend had been marred by tragedy.

So, it was with some reluctance that Maddie and I decided to go home where we could spread out the printouts and talk in private. Using words like “fraud,” “murder,” and “payola” in a public place seemed unnecessarily awkward.

Maddie followed her recently established “hot day in Lincoln Point” routine: as soon as we got in the door, she pushed the button to retract the atrium skylight. She was so enamored of the technology, I feared I’d have to rein her in from opening my house to the cold and rain come the winter (such as it was in this part of the state).