Monster in Miniature (6 page)

Maddie had been about three years old the last time I’d spoken to her so firmly. She’d nearly burned herself climbing up to the stove to investigate a pot of hot chocolate. I’d turned my back for only a moment and she’d made it all the way to the top step of a folding stool, to the counter, ready to dip her hands into the hot liquid. I scooped her up and told her never to do that again. My panic at the time had given my voice a rough tone and we’d both ended up in tears.

I felt the same tone creeping into my voice now. It broke my heart to see her skulk away, her expression disappointed and confused:
What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with Grandma?

What was wrong was that Skip was about to deliver news that I didn’t want to hear.

 

 

I closed the door to Maddie’s room, having attempted to
kiss away the scolding tone. Happily, she’d been tired enough to kiss me back and drift off to sleep.

I returned to my living room, where Skip sat tapping his feet. I took a seat and spoke in a low voice. “It’s about your uncle Ken, isn’t it?”

Skip’s nod sent a shiver through me. He spread his palms. “This can wait, Aunt Gerry,” he said.

“No, it can’t.”

I stiffened against the couch, my hands folded, an ominous shiver traveling the length of my spine.

Skip walked into the kitchen and stood at my open
refrigerator door with the energy of one who’d had no dinner. “Do you have anything good in here?” he asked.

I was sure he was hungry; I was also sure he was desperate to put off telling me what I needed to know.

“Skip,” I said, losing all patience.

“Please, Aunt Gerry. This is hard for me.” He gave me his pleading look, the expression I’d given into all his life.

I got up and pulled out a container of cold cuts and half a loaf of rye bread. I had to admit it felt good to be doing something useful. I spread butter on one slice of bread, spicy mustard on the other. The way Skip liked it. “You can talk while I work,” I said.

When his phone rang, I was convinced he’d managed to call himself. I gave my nephew two minutes to take the call, which he said was critical to the story he was about to tell. “Test results,” he said.

“At midnight?”

“When you care enough.”

“I’m not in the mood, Skip.”

He disappeared around the corner to the family room and came back to an aunt who was on edge but holding out a plate that was the base for a turkey sandwich with lettuce and a slice of Monterey Jack cheese.

“Let me start from the beginning, okay?” Skip asked, clearly sorry he’d opened the topic in the first place.

I looked at my nephew and spoke without a trace of patience or humor—there might as well have been a stranger, or a representative of another police force from a distant state in my living room. “As long as you get to the point.”

“I promise.” We moved back to the living room and sat down on the easy chairs at either end of the couch—about as far away from each other as we could be and still occupy the same room. Skip put his sandwich plate on the coffee table and tented his fingers. “Susan’s brother, Oliver Halbert, got this city inspector job a year or so ago. He replaced this guy, Max Crowley, that I mentioned. The short of it is that Crowley apparently took bribes from Patrick Lynch and other developers on a routine basis.”

“I already got that part.”

“The way it worked was Lynch and his guys would cut corners in building specs and Crowley would look the other way when he inspected the building.”

“What kind of specs?” I folded my hands, trying to guess where Ken fit in.

“You know, different things. It might be substituting substandard materials, just for a cost break, or not meeting safety regs, which would be worse, because a safety code violation could lead to an accident. Apparently, with the right amount of cash crossing his palm, Inspector Crowley could be counted on to give his blessing to a lot of sins. Or would that be sinners?”

Usually an appeal to a point of grammar would be enough to lure me into a lesson on correct usage or word choice, but not tonight.

“Is that why the inspector’s job came open for Oliver Halbert? Because Crowley lost his job when the bribes were uncovered?”

“No. You wish justice were that swift. Crowley had moved on to a bigger and better job.”

“He was promoted?”

“In a manner of speaking. After the scandal, he went to work as Lynch’s number one man. Only in America, huh? Back to Susan’s brother, Oliver Halbert. He was the one who uncovered the bribes. I guess Lynch expected the same service from Halbert that they all got from Crowley, but Halbert would have none of it. He started digging around and eventually the DA was able to make a solid case against Crowley and Lynch. With Halbert’s testimony and some data that Halbert claimed to have, the case was a shoo-in.”

“And now Halbert is out of the way.”

“Yeah, Halbert kills himself just in time to save their hides,” Skip said. “Convenient, huh? But that call I just got was from the ME’s lab. The preliminary result is that his death does look like a suicide.”

My mind was reeling with this background on the victim I’d seen only hours earlier, before I even knew he was Susan’s brother. I was torn between hearing how Ken’s name came up in this nasty picture and avoiding that subject all together. I chose a delay tactic.

“How do the Fergusons fit in? Whether it was suicide or murder, why would it happen at that house?”

“I don’t know exactly, except that the Ferguson twins are renters in one of the worst Lynch facilities, as far as building codes go. They have a small factory on the property, making airplane parts.”

I thought again about the Ferguson twins. The policy at ALHS was to separate siblings, so I’d had only one of the twins, Eliot, in my English class. I remembered how Eliot and Emory, both with identical heavy-framed glasses, would set up pranks, fooling classmates and teachers alike, filling in for each other whenever it suited them. Then Eliot had a skiing accident and never fully recovered: he walked with a slight limp. As much as everyone felt sorry for him, we considered ourselves lucky to have a way to tell the twins apart. I hadn’t seen either of them in a couple of years but assumed they still looked identical, and that Eliot still limped.

Enough history, I thought. I’d probably never again need to be able to distinguish the men from each other.

“What about the data?” I asked Skip. “You said the district attorney had Oliver’s testimony and some data.”

“Yeah, about the data.” Skip took a huge bite of his sandwich and made a show of chewing thoroughly, just as his mother and I had taught him.

I swallowed hard. “Skip, I need to know how Uncle Ken came up in this investigation. Is there some data that . . . that . . .” I seemed physically unable to keep my throat clear to finish the sentence.

He licked his lips and held up his index finger. “One more little thread first,” he said. “Since you asked about the Ferguson twins.” Another reprieve. I’d never felt so conflicted. “Remember that fire that broke out in their factory last year?”

The news had been full of the story, though I’d forgotten whose factory had been involved. “A janitor was killed, wasn’t he?”

“Right. The original ruling on the fire was ‘accidental,’ and the twins were cleared of any fault. But Halbert was on a path to a different theory. He was attempting to prove that the Fergusons, or their staff, had forgotten to turn the compressor off when they left the building for the night. Then, a weakness in the hose attached to it caused the hose to rupture, and of course, the compressor couldn’t keep up the pressure, so it burned out. The compressor was located under a wooden stairway, and”—Skip waved his hands in a gesture that suggested a burst of flames, losing a piece of lettuce from his sandwich in the process—“the stairs caught fire and burned half the building, plus the janitor who happened to be taking a nap break.”

“The twins claim they did not leave their compressor on. They say the problem was with a segment of electrical wiring that had no conduit. That would point the finger back at Halbert himself for not catching that oversight on the part of Lynch. So everyone’s blaming everyone else. If the twins weren’t so tight with Lynch, they’d probably be suing Lynch for cutting corners on the conduit specs. It’s a mess.”

“Is the factory so new that Halbert was the inspector, not Max Crowley?”

“Some sections of it are new and some are old, which is another part of the problem. So now the family of the dead janitor is at sixes and sevens, not knowing whom to sue. Exactly who was the negligent party?”

As sorry as I felt for the person who lost his life, I wondered if Skip gave me that complicated story because he wanted to beat around the Ken Porter bush as much as I did. But it was late and I’d waited long enough.

“Uncle Ken?” I asked.

Skip brushed rye crumbs from his hands, then ran his long, freckled fingers through his hair. One half sandwich was down. “There’s nothing definite on this. I probably shouldn’t even bring it up.”

I’d reached my limit. “Skip.” My strongest voice, the one that had sent Richard or Skip to their rooms many a time.

“Okay, here it is. We took a pile of notebooks from Halbert’s apartment and we’re just starting to go through them. One notebook has a list of what Halbert labeled
Potentials
, which we take to mean persons or line items that he had in mind to investigate.”

“That’s the data? But you said the district attorney had the data.”

“No, I said the DA had Halbert’s testimony plus some data that Halbert claimed to have. Big difference.”

“But you found the data in Oliver’s notebooks?”

Skip made a so-so motion with his hands. “I’m not sure I’d call it data. We have some names, but no specifics. We already know a lot of the people on the list because they’ve been involved in questionable transactions in the past. Some of them are related to bribes; some are related to accidents where it wasn’t clear who was at fault, like at the factory fire. Things like that.”

“And?”

Skip sighed deeply. “Uncle Ken’s name was on the list.”

I tried to reach the arms of the couch, to lean on them. They were far away and I swayed so far to one side, with such a jerky motion, there might have been an earthquake with an epicenter under us. I felt my cheeks burn, my mouth go dry. “Oliver Halbert thought my Ken might have been involved in a bribery or some other unethical activity?”

“It looks that way,” Skip said in a voice I could barely hear. “Maybe.”

I sat up and forced a breath through my jaws. “Couldn’t Ken’s name have been on the list because he might have been able to help Oliver prove something against another party? Maybe Oliver didn’t know that Ken isn’t alive anymore. It hasn’t been that long.”

It didn’t seem long to me, for sure. Why wasn’t Ken here now, in fact? Walking through the doorway to the kitchen, eating the last of the ginger cookies, asking for another batch? Defending his reputation.

Skip flinched, just enough to tell me his next words would be suspect. “That’s right, Aunt Gerry. Maybe Uncle Ken was down as an expert witness, or—”

His expression told me something different. I shook my head. “No, no. Oliver Halbert thought Ken himself participated in some criminal act, didn’t he?”

“Maybe not criminal.”

I looked at my nephew. “What, then?”

“Suspicious?” He whispered the questionable word. “But that’s just a dim possibility, Aunt Gerry. We haven’t even begun to check out what the list really means, if anything.”

I put my hand on my forehead. I thought I might have a fever. Could tension bring on a fever? I’d held my breath for so long, I was light-headed. “You just told me that you saw the names of disreputable people on the list. You must know more than you’re telling me.”

Skip looked as miserable as I felt. “I don’t know what to tell you, Aunt Gerry. Uncle Ken was the architect on the new addition to the Fergusons’ factory. It was one of his last projects with Patrick Lynch before . . . you know . . . he got sick.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“There were some problems with the project. I think they were weather-related, or maybe labor, I don’t know. But the twins were on a deadline to produce some parts for a company in L.A., and they needed the capabilities of the new wing. There’s a good chance they shaved some safety features for the sake of speeding things up.”

“
They
shaved? Who?” I didn’t give Skip a chance to respond. “Why on earth would anyone suspect Ken Porter of doing something like that? He was the most honest man in the world. You know that.” I sounded like Maddie, who, in her innocence, thought everyone she loved was perfect.

Skip had firsthand knowledge of Ken, who’d stepped in when Skip’s father died in the first Gulf War. During periods when his mother, Ken’s sister, Beverly, was unable to cope, Skip slept in my son’s room more often than he did his own.