Monster in Miniature (10 page)

I couldn’t recall a time when I’d entertained so many strange fantasies and half dreams. Late-night visitors were taking their toll, especially those connected to homicide. I needed to get more sleep.

The very real footsteps got louder.

“Grandma, we got worried,” Maddie said, tramping in with her heavy athletic shoes, which were nothing like the flimsy white sneakers I’d worn to gym class in the Bronx. Not content with simple white laces, both Taylor and Maddie owned shoes with colorful Velcro tabs, blinking red lights, and shiny wheels that surprised me every time Maddie rocked back on them and wheeled herself around me.

Henry was close behind Maddie. “Your garage door is still open,” he said, sounding worried that someone might have walked in and stolen me away.

“What time is it?” I asked, craning my stiff neck to see the clock. Which must have been off by a couple of hours. “It can’t be five o’clock.”

It seemed it was. I’d slept more than three hours.

Maddie had made her way to my lap. Or at least some of Maddie was on my lap. Tall for her age, she no longer fit comfortably. Her legs dangled next to my still, stiff ones; her neck was bent to snuggle in mine.

“You didn’t call,” she said. “And you weren’t answering your phone.” She picked up my cell phone and frowned. “It’s not even on. But we called your landline, too. You must have been really out.” She held me as if she’d been worried that she’d never see or hear from me again.

“I’m sorry to make you worry, sweetheart, but I’m fine.” I opened my eyes as wide as I could and smiled as broadly as I could, emphasizing my point.

I looked at Henry, standing by. “Sorry,” I said.

“We’re just glad you’re okay,” he said.

I remembered that my car was still in front of his house, from ten this morning. “I should go back with you and get my car,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I drove your car here, Grandma,” Maddie said.

Even before she gave me her teasing grin, I tickled her all around her middle. Nice to know I wasn’t that far gone.

 

 

Back from Henry’s with my car, I thought it was time I
retrieved my messages. Between my home answering machine and my cell phone voice mail, I had eight messages, not counting the many short ones from Maddie. The eight were from two people—four from Beverly and four from Susan. The gist of Beverly’s sequence was “Can we have lunch today?” (the one I’d ignored as I left the house in the morning), followed by two versions of “It might be too late for lunch now,” and finally, “Maybe I’ll stop by for dinner.”

Maddie curtailed her table-setting activities when she heard the last one and rushed to call her Aunt Beverly. (We had researched the question and found that one’s grandfather’s sister should be called a great-aunt, but Beverly refused any designation preceded by “great.”)

“Aunt Beverly said she was coming over anyway,” Maddie said, hanging up the phone. “She was worried when you didn’t answer your phones. How could you sleep through all that ringing? I called the line in the kitchen a lot, even more than the times I left a message.”

I doubted she was exaggerating. “I must have been really tired,” I told her.

I supposed I should have been grateful and flattered that I was missed after only a long nap.

Susan’s messages were also sequential. They began with, “Have you been to Oliver’s place yet?” and ended with, “I’m anxious to hear what you found at Oliver’s place.” Susan spoke in a gravelly voice that was different from her usual lilting southern tones. I suspected she was also short on sleep these days.

I felt like a dud. With the whole day at my disposal, I’d opened only one of Ken’s boxes, done nothing to help Susan, pawned my granddaughter off on other people, and was now barely scraping a dinner together. It was a good thing Beverly was family, or I would have had to rethink the platter of leftovers I was planning to serve.

My greatest wish was that I’d gone to Oliver’s apartment and picked up the miniature scene for Susan and found a suicide note the police may have overlooked. Cruel as that sounded, it would have brought a speedy close to Susan’s questioning and started her on the road to proper grieving.

I had another wish. I wished I’d stayed awake, gone through every scrap of paper in every one of Ken’s boxes and found only praiseworthy correspondence, perhaps one reading,
Dear Mr. Porter, we accept your high moral position and your exemplary decision not to join us in our shady dealings. Best wishes, signed, All the Other Potentials on Oliver Halbert’s List.

Yes, I had been a good creative writing teacher, I mused.

 

 

“You look a little out of it this evening. Is something
wrong?” Beverly asked. She’d held her question until Maddie had left for the kitchen to fill three bowls with ice cream.

“Other than hosting a dinner of leftovers?” I asked, tensing.

She pointed to the nearly empty serving bowls on the table. “Chicken cutlets, potato salad, green beans with almonds, and homemade dilly bread. I’ll take your leftovers any day.”

“Me, too,” Maddie said. “Except for mixing nuts with the vegetable.” She made a disgusted face, which quickly brightened as she plunked a small tray on the table and handed out bowls of chocolate ice cream. By long-standing agreement, she deposited the bowl with the largest amount of ice cream at her place. I was glad to have her back, not for the dessert, but because it meant I didn’t have to tell Beverly what was wrong with me: I was in essence investigating her brother.

This was a long holiday weekend for Maddie and she
was mine until I delivered her to her Palo Alto school on Tuesday morning. Her parents were in San Francisco for a few much-needed days of relaxation, staying in a friend’s oceanside condo. Though Richard cared deeply for his profession as a surgeon, the job was stressful. I was delighted that Mary Lou gently forced him into quarterly getaways and time-outs when he was required to leave his pager in a desk drawer.

I always loved extra time with Maddie; this weekend there was a bonus in that I could use her as an excuse to leave the boxes in my garage unopened and the foreign key in my purse unused. I had to babysit, after all.

On the other hand, our bedtime chat tonight was more like a conference Skip might have with his LPPD colleagues.

“Did you call Mrs. Giles back and give her a report on The Case?” Maddie asked. She was sitting up in bed, arms folded across her chest. The chief of police couldn’t be more intimidating to his subordinates, the aroma of her strawberry bubble bath notwithstanding.

“Not yet.”

“Didn’t you find anything out today?” she asked.

Nothing I could share. (Where did she learn that stare?) I’d discovered that it was going to be harder than I thought to tear open cartons of material that had Ken’s name all over it. I was no chemist, but I’d have bet I wasn’t imagining things when I’d smelled my husband’s slightly musky scent when I unsealed the box of telephone logs.

“No, I didn’t find out anything.”

“Then, what were you doing all day, Grandma?”

“It wasn’t exactly all day. Just a couple of hours.”

“It was from eleven twenty when you left for lunch with Mr. Baker to almost five o’clock. I wanted to come home sooner, but Mr. Baker said you needed some private time. I figured it was about The Case, right?”

“I took a nap, remember?”

“Well, I did,” Maddie said.

That was a surprise. “You took a nap, too?”

“No, I found out something.”

I’d lost the continuity and now saw that the “I did” referred to making good use of the day.

“You found out something about what?” This was one of those times when it would have been helpful to have a whiteboard and dry-erase markers in Maddie’s room.

Maddie turned her head and gave me a sideways glance. “About The Case. I used Taylor’s laptop to Google Oliver Halbert.”

I wanted to ask if Taylor’s parents were aware of the forensics investigation going on in their daughter’s bedroom. There was no use discussing the bigger issue of sleuthing as a hobby for an eleven-year-old; Maddie won those debates hands down. I might as well reap the rewards.

“What did you learn?”

“He used to be in jail.”

I grimaced. “I doubt it.”

I should have learned by now not to question my granddaughter’s research skills. She threw back the covers and went to her own laptop on her desk. This was not sleep inducing. What had happened to the days when I sat on her bed and read a soothing, happy-ending story with no more serious a crime than a trampled cabbage patch or a stolen coin? At an hour when she should have been nodding off with a sweet smile on her face, she was upright at her computer, clicking intently. I consoled myself with the fact that at least tomorrow, Sunday, was not a school day.

“Here it is,” she said, beckoning me with a finger that seemed to have grown as long and crooked as that of
Macbeth
’s second witch, as I envisioned her.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
Some things, once memorized, never left our consciousness.

On Maddie’s monitor was a newspaper photo of a young Oliver Halbert. The caption read, “Local man arrested on DUI.”

I studied the photo. The man, looking back over his shoulder at the camera (he couldn’t have intended that), had the same high forehead, thick neck, and narrow eyes I’d seen briefly on Oliver where he was slumped on the Fergusons’ porch and more recently in his sister’s photographs of him. I doubted the arrestee was another Oliver Halbert from the small town of Bethelville, Tennessee. The newspaper was dated fifteen years ago, which would have put Oliver in his early thirties, well beyond the frat party phase.

Besides the pressing issue of Oliver Halbert’s arrest record, there was the curious question of how Google got a photograph from a time when the Internet was barely developed and certainly not widely used. I pictured a room full of teenagers entering mountains of data and scanning photos from the past.

I wondered also how Oliver could have landed a government job in Lincoln Point when he had a record. Maybe this was a low-priority arrest. I’d have to ask Skip.

“See?” Maddie said.

I patted her head. “Good girl.” A question formed in my mind: what were the chances that a person would be arrested once, as an isolated incident, in his thirties? I supposed he could have learned his lesson, but there was also a chance that this was a pattern. “Can you see if there are any more”—how to phrase it to my underage researcher—“things he might have been in jail for?”

“I already looked at all the hits and I couldn’t find anything except one more that was part of a police thing. Something about bribing someone, but he didn’t do it. They thought he did, but it turned out he didn’t.”

“Is that so?” I said, mostly to myself. “Can you show me that hit?” I asked Maddie, proud of my jargon.

“You mean ‘open that link’?” my sassy granddaughter responded.

“Whatever.”

The article, with no photo this time, was brief: Oliver Halbert was accused of offering a bribe to an insurance agent, to arrange for a larger settlement from the agent’s company. The case seemed to be about mold in his home. According to the story, he’d been trying to convince the agent to backdate his policy so that it would cover more of the damaged area.

How could that be? Wasn’t his latest crusade about bribery? Wasn’t it bribery that got him murdered, according to Susan?

I remembered something Skip had told me a while ago—that the people who speak out the most loudly against a particular crime are often guilty of that crime themselves. He cited a few examples of people in the national spotlight.

“What makes a public person think they can get away with it?” I’d asked. Something I’d often wondered about.

Skip had gone on about people in power who not only think they’re immune (even when their colleagues are caught) but also are great risk takers. I was glad I wasn’t expected to understand that type of personality fully. Now, however, I wondered if Oliver Halbert had suffered from the same syndrome Skip had described and that I’d read about.

I didn’t look forward to telling Susan what we’d discovered about her brother. Dismissed charges or not, there was a blot on the image I’d had of Oliver Halbert, the crusader for clean politics. Susan would be upset, unless she already knew of her brother’s record, in which case, her worst nightmare would have come true—that I’d find out and not help her prove he was murdered.

I could almost hear her: “Just because my brother wasn’t as white as the lilies all a-bloomin’ in Nashville, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t murdered.”

I agreed with her in advance. Strangely, I was now more inclined to use the key to her brother’s apartment. The key that beckoned from my purse, three rooms and two baths away.

“Any more links you want me to open, Grandma?” Maddie asked, her words carrying that telltale slur that said she was fading.