Mourning In Miniature (23 page)

 

 

The reception following the service was in a room at the
back of the mortuary, a brighter, more airy space with large windows opening onto a neatly manicured lawn.

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.

“Rosie’s at the police station.”

I glanced over at Henry. He stood where I’d left him, to the side of the line for David’s parents, arms crossed. I figured he’d planned on having me join him for what could pass for lunch at the buffet table. A pleasant enough thought, if I weren’t so busy.

Ben was less than twenty feet from the exit.

Back to Linda. “I’m glad to hear that, Linda, but I’m surprised Rosie skipped the service for David.”

“She didn’t have a choice. They picked her up in Miller’s parking lot as she was going into the mortuary.”

And Cheryl had seen the action, I realized. Her twisted metaphor had made no sense at the time.

My heart sank, my eyes focusing now on Henry, now on Ben, and back. “They arrested her?” I asked Linda.

“No handcuffs or anything,” Linda said. “She just got in an LPPD car.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know people.” We both laughed at the sinister implication. “I mean, there’s a lot of business between us and Miller’s.”

“Of course there is.” I pictured a large black van making not infrequent trips between the Mary Todd assisted living facility and Miller’s Mortuary.

“It’s awful, Gerry. What are you going to do?”

“It might not mean anything, if they weren’t arresting her. The most they can do is cite her for being uncooperative,” I said. I had to check that little detail in the police handbook, if there was one.

Ben closed in on the exit to the parking lot. I carried my phone with me as I followed him, keeping stragglers between us whenever possible.

He took his keys out.

I took mine out.
What was I doing?

“I’m sure Rosie would like it if you went down to the station right away, Gerry.”

Ben approached a late-model sedan at the edge of the lot and got in.

I approached my Ion and got in.

I seemed to be on autopilot as I put my key in the ignition, turned on the engine, and started backing up. “I’ll get to the police station as soon as I can,” I told Linda, breaking the California hands-free law for a car in motion. “I have an errand to do first.”

I turned my head to look over my shoulder as I rolled out of the parking spot in reverse.

Henry Baker was standing in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his light summer jacket. I couldn’t see the details of his face, but his posture seemed dejected, as if he’d been given a brush-off, not that different from the one Rosie had experienced from David.

It couldn’t be helped, I told myself.

Miller’s Mortuary predated the row of stores on the east
side of Springfield Boulevard. Its asphalt driveway was now wedged between a card shop and a do-it-yourself ceramics shop. I drove out, allowing about three car lengths between Ben and me. I was confident that he wouldn’t think it unusual that someone would leave the mortuary at about the same time that he did.

I pulled out onto Springfield and turned left, following the dark blue, ordinary-looking car. A Toyota? A Ford? I’d never been good at identifying a vehicle unless it was a limousine or a pickup truck.

I questioned my decision-making process. Faced with the choice of, one, comforting and aiding Rosie, who might be arrested at any moment; two, having an appealing repast with Henry, whom I was growing to appreciate as a friend; and three, tailing a man I thought might be a killer, I’d chosen the last. If nothing else, Ben Dobson was the only person in my recent history who’d shown a temper. And I’d elected to follow him to places unknown.

My only defense was that finding who killed David was the best thing I could do for my old friend; then I’d have time for new friends.

I’d hung up on Linda unceremoniously, telling her I’d call her right back, though the promise went out of my mind immediately. At almost noon on a workday, there wasn’t much traffic. This was a good thing in that I was not an experienced follower and might have lost my target, but a bad thing in that it might be obvious to Ben that he had an unwelcome visitor in his rearview mirror.