Monster in Miniature (16 page)

The door between the rooms was wide open, held there by a brick doorstop. There was no choice other than to make myself known, to act as though I belonged here. I could be part of the cleaning crew, or the landlady. I’d play it cool, as Maddie might have said before she switched to “wicked.” I didn’t want my appearance to be too much of a surprise to the men, so I deliberately made noise as I marched across the bedroom and reached the threshold between the bedroom and the living room.

So much of my attention went into that move that I tripped on the edge of the ugly paisley rug and fell into the living room, knocking my head on the brick doorstop.

The living room, as seen from the floor, spun full circle. Then I tasted loose threads from Oliver’s dingy rug and all was black.

 

 

I woke up lying on the ugly orange couch, with a
splitting headache, and with what Skip would call “goons” sitting in the awful green chairs, which they’d pulled close together.

Where was Skip anyway? How long had I been here? I didn’t want to know how I’d gotten to this position. The questions poured from my tired brain. Why hadn’t anyone come looking for me? How come when I took a little nap in my own home, everyone missed me, but now that I was virtually kidnapped by two strange men in a strange apartment, no one noticed? The men were dressed as counter opposites: the taller man wore a beige sports coat and tie, the other man wore jeans and a denim jacket. Neither was especially large, but both frightened me.

And thinking of the police, why hadn’t I called Skip before coming to Oliver’s apartment? I could have had him meet me here. It wasn’t as if I were planning an illegal entry. He’d have understood why Susan wanted me to come. My police detective nephew could have been pulling up at the curb right now. My own arrogance (stupidity?) had brought me to this end.

I looked across the room to the window. It was still light out, so perhaps I hadn’t been here that long. When I tried to sit up, the room traveled clockwise, stopped, and spun counterclockwise. My head fell back down on the dirty, smelly orange pillow. I’d fainted only two or three times in my life, so I didn’t have a good measure of when I could expect to be back to normal.

Or if I could expect to leave Oliver’s apartment alive.

I looked at the men, sitting in a relaxed position on the chairs. The shorter one was so relaxed that his denim jacket had fallen open to reveal the butt of a gun.

I felt another wave of nausea and tried to convince myself that if they’d wanted to kill me, they’d had their best chance already. My instinct was to pretend I was still asleep. For how long? Until they left? I knew that wouldn’t work.

“Who are you?” I asked, when I could no longer stand the silence and the fear that had built up in my mind. It wasn’t lost on me that these men could be Oliver’s killers, but someone had to start the conversation. I took it as a good sign that the gun wasn’t actually pointed at me. Maybe it was something other than a gun. A tool of some kind. I could only hope.

“Who are
you
?” the strong voice, from the taller man asked.

I put together the pieces of what I’d seen and heard before my graceful entry. The strong voice belonged to the man called “the boss.” Good to know the pecking order in a situation like this.

“I’m a friend of Susan’s, Oliver Halbert’s sister.” My throat was dry to the point of hurting. I wondered if I dared ask for a glass of water.

“What are you doing here?” The strong voice again.

I could ask them the same question, but I didn’t want to trigger (so to speak) the appearance of a weapon.

“I came to get some personal items. His sister, my friend, is not up to the task right now, and she wants to be sure the landlord doesn’t throw everything out before she can get here.” I took a deep breath and complimented myself on coming up with a very reasonable story under extraordinary conditions.

“Items?” The boss said the word as if he were sounding it out, about to learn its meaning for the first time. “Like what items?” Again, he pronounced the word “i-tems.”

Interrogation was apparently the boss’s job, questioning a material witness to their break-in. Except, I recalled they had entered the apartment as I had, with a key. I’d heard it turn in the lock before I scuttled back to the bedroom. Did Susan provide their key, also? Did she lack confidence in me and hire others for the same job? I hoped they were getting paid more than I was.

My deteriorating mental state aside, I had to come up with an answer to the boss’s “item” question. “I was in the bedroom looking for a watch and a medal his sister gave him.” Not bad for on-the-spot fiction. All those years of reading and teaching composition were paying off. I didn’t have a clear idea of why I hadn’t owned up to taking the room box, except that I felt it might be too complicated to describe.

“What kind of medal? Like a war medal?” the subordinate asked.

“Nah, she means like a saint’s medal,” the boss said. “Right?” he asked, as though that had better be the correct answer. Were my captors practicing Catholics? Could I use the famous Catholic guilt to win my freedom? I tried to remember which shoulder came first in making the sign of the cross.

Too late I recalled Skip’s advice about lying (make it as simple as possible) and my own when I taught creative writing (use what you know). I wracked my brain for the name of a Catholic saint. “A Saint Jude medal,” I said, flashing on the name of the hospital to which I often donated money at the request of friends when their loved ones died. I wondered if that would count as points now.

“Ha, that’s a good one. Patron of lost causes,” said the shorter man, the nonboss, who laughed until the boss gave him a serious frown and a nudge that also looked serious.

I winced as if my own ribs had been slammed. I hoped I hadn’t started a chain of violence. Weren’t Catholic saints supposed to bring peace and love?

“Did you find them?”

“Who?” I asked.

“The i-tems. The watch and the medal,” the boss said.

Ah, of course.
“No, I just got here.” I brought out the most sincere smile I could. “Is that what you came for, too? Did Susan send you?” I managed a hollow-sounding chuckle. “That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? Wanting to double-check.”

Make nice.

The nonboss started to say something, but the boss shot him that look again.

“Mr. Halbert is an associate and we are here looking for property of ours that was in his custody,” the boss said.

Apparently real-life goons talked the way movie goons did. They even looked like movie goons, the boss with hardly any hair and a scar across his cheek, the underling with a rose tattoo on the back of his hand. The question was—were they the movie hit men who did the killing, or were they the good guys, ones dispatched to protect the innocent? I thought it best not to ask.

I took another shot at sitting up. The men reacted by putting their right hands on their hips. Were there two guns? Or did they both get an attack of arthritis pain at the same time? In other circumstances I would have been greatly amused. I stayed half up, half down, stuffed into the corner of the orange sofa, much the way Oliver had been sitting on the Fergusons’ stoop.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked, to fill the silence.

Another blunder. Had I learned nothing from my nephew? “Guilty people always chatter when there’s silence,” he’d told me. “My job is to wait them out.”

Lucky for me, my captors chose to ignore my question. “Can we help you to your car?” the boss asked.

I nearly jumped from my half-sitting position. “I can go?”

Strike three for what not to do when armed men had the upper hand. A rule to live by: don’t give them choices that could work out disastrously for you.

Although I knew I’d flunked the “interview” at every turn, the nonboss handed me my tote. Close up, I could see that the rose in the tattoo design had more thorns than petals.

“You don’t mind that we looked in your bag? We had to be sure you didn’t take any of our property by mistake,” the boss said.

“No, no,” I stammered. “That’s all right. I just took a broken miniature scene.”

“We know.”

And you also know who I am if you looked through my bag,
I thought. I considered that not good news.

“I’m going to fix the box,” I stammered, as if it were his box I’d dropped.

Was there a game that had four strikes, the fourth pertaining to offering unnecessary information to captors who were about to emancipate you?

“We know.” Now the boss seemed more anxious for me to leave than I was.

I stood and made a giant effort not to sway. I held my tote in front of me, chest high, wishing it were bulletproof, though it had been a while since I’d actually seen the handle of the gun, if that’s what it was. I walked toward the door, slowly, at one point grabbing on to a floor lamp.

The nonboss rushed over to me and put his ugly hand under my elbow to steady me.

“I’m fine, thank you,” I said, relieved when his beefy arm dropped to his side.

The men watched in silence as I tottered the rest of the way to the door. I wondered if they were going to shoot me in the back, too cowardly to kill me while looking me in the eyes. Oliver Halbert had been shot by someone facing him, I realized. How frightened he must have been. I shivered at the image.

Only a few more steps and I’d be out the door. Would I hear a gunshot aimed at my back? Or would I be dead before the sound traveled to my ear? What would they do with my body? Prop it up on Oliver’s couch?

It was a bad time to remember something Skip told us about after a seminar he’d taken at the police academy. Legislation was being proposed to use a process called alkaline hydrolysis (or something chemical like that) to dispose of human bodies. Animal carcasses had been going this way for many years—burned in lye at a very high temperature and a great deal of pressure in a stainless-steel cylinder. Essentially, they were pressure-cooked, the remains being a syrupy residue that could be flushed down the drain.

I swallowed hard. My family would never find me. I continued walking, clutching my tote, listening for the gunshot.

The loudest noise I heard was the sound of the door closing behind me.

 

 

I stumbled into the driver’s seat and immediately locked
my car doors. I longed to lean back on the seat awhile to catch my breath and steady my nerves, but I also wanted to get out of gunshot range as soon as possible.

I dug in my tote for my keys and found them out of their usual inside pocket. The contents of my tote were all out of order. The coins that had been in my wallet were now loose at the bottom of the bag and the miniature construction site was a bit more banged up. I felt lucky that they were the only things that had been manhandled.

I had the crazy thought that I should have spent my own time in the apartment looking for papers, also, instead of examining a miniature scene that wasn’t that different from a hundred others I saw at shows and in my crafts group. Perhaps I would have found more evidence of Oliver’s interest in my husband—proof of Ken’s absolute innocence of any wrongdoing would have been nice.

All in all, I was glad to be alive and happy that I hadn’t been toting anything of interest to the goons.

In the safety of my home, I curled up on my own hand
some, cream-colored sofa with a steaming cup of chamomile tea. I needed all the soothing I could get.

I toyed with the idea of calling Skip, but what a convoluted conversation that would be as I skirted around certain aspects of my outing. At some point I’d have to tell him what might simply have been fantasy from the barista at Seward’s Folly. I had nothing to report to Susan, except that I’d found, broken, and nearly lost the little construction scene she’d made for her brother. I’d wait until I’d had a chance to repair the box before I called her.

I missed Maddie. What had I been doing out where I didn’t belong, putting myself in danger for no good reason, when I should have been enjoying ice cream sundaes and making orange-and-black garlands with my granddaughter? If her parents knew how negligent I’d been, they’d probably take away my visitation rights.

I dug out my cell phone, the closest phone to me, and pushed speed dial for Maddie. I knew her ring comprised a few notes of a Madonna (the singer, not the Catholic saint) song that was popular when her parents were in junior high. I hummed the few notes in my mind as I waited for Maddie to pick up. Click on? Push talk? I feared I’d never catch up with the changes in common phrases brought about by technology.

“Wow, Grandma, you called me! Wow!” Maddie sounded so excited, I felt even worse about my neglect of her.

“How’s your day in the big city?”

“It’s okay. We’re at Pier Thirty-nine now. It says on the Internet that the temperature here is sixty-three degrees, six degrees below the average high temperature for October in San Francisco.”