I slowed down and pulled over to the right on Springfield Boulevard, across from Sadie’s, intending to cross the street and scan the shop for movement. This put me almost directly in front of Scrap’s, Lincoln Point’s worst fast-food restaurant. (You’d think if you were going to serve inferior foodstuff, you wouldn’t make it so obvious by the name of your establishment.)
Scrap’s opened very early to serve the breakfast-bacon-to-go crowd, a few of whom were exiting now with white paper sacks. I could almost see the grease leaking through from where I sat in my car, exchanging glasses and gathering my purse.
I was about to exit when a family group caught my eye. On closer inspection-not a family group, but Cheryl Mellace, Barry Cannon, and a little boy about four years old. I pulled my leg back in and snapped the visor down in front of my face.
Was the woman who could buy and sell the entire town of Lincoln Point a closet junk-food junkie? Neither Cheryl nor Barry had a to-go sack, so they must have eaten inside the restaurant. Who could guess that Scrap’s was the in place for celebrity sighting?
The group stopped only a few yards from my car. Cheryl and Barry, her husband’s CFO, were engaged in animated conversation, but not arguing, as far as I could make out. Cheryl held fast to the little boy’s hand. I’d read that her children were grown and figured this to be a grandson.
I thought of rolling down my window but didn’t want to make the slightest noise, lest they see me. My plan for that contingency was to wave and pretend I’d just arrived. I was torn between clandestine observation and full-fledged interaction. Why wait until the service, almost two hours away?
Before I could make my choice, the group broke up. Cheryl had picked up the little boy and walked north toward Hanks Road. The toddler nuzzled his face on Cheryl’s shoulder, as Maddie used to do. Cheryl patted his back and nuzzled him back. It was the first soft gesture I’d seen from her and I had to rethink my view of her as cold and witch-like. Grandmothers could dump their grandchildren into pools, I knew, but they couldn’t be killers, could they?
Barry came toward me. I turned my back to the sidewalk, using my purse to shield my profile. Barry walked quickly, looking straight ahead.
The moment was gone to speak to either Cheryl or Barry. My reaction time had been too slow. If I’d already had a milk shake, I might have done better.
I decided against Sadie’s also, however, and headed for home.
I thought back to the muted conversation between Cheryl and Barry. I hadn’t seen any sign of mourning or grief. Not that outward manifestations were necessary, and not that life had to stand still when a friend died. But having seen Cheryl with David on Friday night, I expected less normalcy in her behavior just two days after his death.
I replayed the scene. Had there been any clue of a romantic connection between the two? I didn’t think so. Surely, it would be too soon for Cheryl to replace David in that way. But maybe she had the ability to bounce back emotionally the way she bounced on the football field with her pom-poms.
Alas, none of this was my area of expertise.
When I returned home, I found Skip at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee, toast, and a half dozen of my ginger cookies.
“Why do you bother with the toast?” I asked him.
“Appearances.”
I poured a cup of coffee for myself and joined him.
“I thought we could chat before the service,” he said. “It would help a lot if you could give me your version of the relationship between Rosie and Bridges.”
I felt a conundrum coming on, like the hint of a headache when I didn’t get enough sleep or when I didn’t switch from coffee to tea early enough in the day. If I told Skip of the obsessive nature of Rosie’s attachment, real or fictional, to David Bridges, and her deep-seated anger after his rebuke, it would make matters worse for her.
I related the story in as neutral terms as possible, making it sound like high school-style unrequited love. “We’ve all been there,” I ended, as if I myself had once staked all my happiness on the off chance that someone I hadn’t talked to in thirty years was now longing for me.
“Hmm,” was all Skip said. Maybe, unlike me, he had been there.
“Can we review the other suspects?” I asked. “For example, have you looked into the man named Ben whom I told you about-David’s employee?”
“The SFPD might have picked up on that.”
“Might have? Don’t you share?”
“They wouldn’t necessarily share that. They interviewed a lot of the reunion class and even other guests who were at the hotel that night. I’m assuming if the fight was that public, one of them would have remembered, too.”
“They didn’t interview me or Rosie, so on that alone we know they’re not being thorough.”
Skip shrugged and left the table. He pulled a plastic storage bag from a box in my kitchen drawer and filled it with ginger cookies. From the number he took, I guessed he was planning on a long, tough day.
I was thrown back in time to the young boy, newly fatherless, who visited Ken and me (mostly Ken) more and more often, falling asleep on our guest bed or on the floor in his cousin Richard’s room, treating our home as his. They were difficult days for all of us, especially for Beverly, who drew comfort from her brother’s near adoption of her son.
I was almost surprised to hear the voice of the grown-up Skip as he addressed me now, back at the table, notebook and pen ready.
“This is what happens sometimes when there’s questionable jurisdiction at the beginning. I hate to say it, but now and then things fall through the cracks.”
It bothered me that a murderer might go free because of a breach of continuity in an investigation from one city to another less than an hour away. It didn’t seem a very thorough way to do police business, but I resisted complaining to Skip. I knew his job was hard enough.
“And when it’s early in a case, no one knows exactly what will matter in the end and we try to cover all bases,” Skip continued, while I pondered my next move.
“Can’t you go to San Francisco and find out more about this maintenance supervisor, Ben Dobson? It’s peculiar that one minute he’s fighting with the victim, and the next he quits on the spot.” I thought back to my own inability to get anything out of Mike the electrician and only the vaguest mention of Ben’s temperament from Enrico the plumber.
“How do you know he was a supervisor?”
“My toilet got stopped up,” I said.
Skip gave me a confused look, then laughed as if I’d told a joke. I let it go at that.
It was time I came through for my nephew, and did something that would benefit Rosie also. The sooner Rosie showed up for the police, the sooner we could get to the bottom of the case and clear her. It wasn’t as if Rosie were doing any good out there, now technically in the wind, since neither Linda nor I knew where she was holing up. She wasn’t in any shape to investigate on her own, but maybe the police would get a tidbit from her that would help.
I decided to come clean (almost) about my recent brushes with assault, in case there might be a useful tidbit buried in the incidents.
Skip jotted notes and kept any responses to himself while I talked. I described Walter Mellace’s stopping me aggressively in the hallway. I was a little vague on the timeline and on what you might call… ahem… trespassing, but I had the feeling Skip was able to put it all together nicely. He remained surprisingly restrained.
“Doesn’t that sound like you should look at those RFPs and why Callahan and Savage gets the short end all the time?” I asked.
Skip nodded. “I already put someone on that. It turns out that Bridges did have decision-making power on that stuff. He was only one vote on the hotel’s executive committee, but when it came to anything related to maintenance or upgrades, they essentially followed his recommendation.”