Died to Match (18 page)

“Sure, I’ll call you,” he said from behind the smoke, “but let’s forget all this amateur detective crap. Stay out of it. Leave it to the cops.”

“You said yourself you were starting to believe Corinne.”

He shrugged. “How do I know she’s not playing games, too?”

“What do you mean, too? I’m not playing games, not with you and not about Mercedes! I need you to identify some of the Sentinel people, and—”

“So ask Zack,” he said flatly. “It’ll give you something to do while you’re not having sex.”

That tore it. I turned around and marched back inside. I was trembling, more from anger than cold, and I wanted hot coffee. Or a drink. Inside, Betty was bustling around my kitchen putting away the jam and cream cheese, her pert black curls bouncing as she went.

“Carnegie, there you are!” said Buck. “Mother and I have to run, but we had some ideas about place cards—”

“Monday,” I snapped, and then softened my tone. “We’ll talk about place cards at the cake tasting on Monday, all right? Thanks for breakfast. Betty, I’ll finish that, really.”

“All done, dear. Except for the pineapple. I wasn’t sure where to put it.”

“Just leave it there. It, ah, makes a nice centerpiece.”

“So it does!” She beamed at me. “Isn’t she just clever, Father? I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

And they beamed their way out the door. Zack, still sitting at the kitchen table, waved good-bye and reached for another cinnamon roll.

“Zack, have you got some free time today?”

“Sure! All day, if you want.”

“That’s great. Let’s go up to the office and look over the guest list from the party.”

I’d finished my latte, so I reheated the cappuccino in the microwave. But only because it was too early for wine.

“C
ARNEGIE?
”

“Hmm?”

“Are you going to finish your pizza?”

“Help yourself.” I slid the Pagliacci’s box across my desk without taking my eyes from the list I was scribbling. After making a final notation, I looked up. “How can you eat that?”

“It’s good!” Zack protested, his mouth full.

“No, I mean how can you eat pepperoni on top of all those cinnamon rolls?”

He shrugged. “That was, like, hours ago.”

Not all that many hours, really, but we’d made a lot of progress. After explaining my original and now discarded theory about Skull—Zack had heard about the purse-snatching incident—I laid out my current plan. Mercedes was killed after eleven o’clock, and Corinne was smothered with a black cloak; if the police wouldn’t put those two facts together, then I would. No more harebrained notions about tattooed party crashers, and no speculation about motives. Just solid reasoning that Lieutenant Graham couldn’t dismiss out of hand.

Zack wasn’t my first choice of a partner to tackle this puzzle—for all his good resolutions of the night before, I
wondered if I’d been too accepting of his unpredictable temper. But I needed help, and he’d been at the party and knew a lot of the guests. And besides, I was still angry at Aaron. I’d be damned if I’d let him dictate who I spent time with.

So Zack and I combined our memories of the party to come up with the names of guests who wore black-caped costumes. Then I made a couple of dozen phone calls to those people and others, claiming to be checking on the return of their costumes and the level of satisfaction with my work as a party planner. Most people were happy to gossip about the behavior and attire of their fellow guests, and as they reported on who left early and who stayed late, our list began to shrink. I also called Elizabeth, and heard just what I hoped for: everyone was delighted with the rehearsal dinner, and her mother, Monica, would definitely be at the EMP sans Lars.

While I worked the phone, Zack kept busy over at Eddie’s desk, scoping out the wonderful world of weddings on the Internet and making notes about his Made in Heaven project. He took his work seriously, I was glad to see. At one point he discovered Dorothy Fenner’s elaborate web site, and raved about it until I asked him to stop. Dorothy, gracious and wealthy, was the premier bridal consultant in the Northwest, and I’d lost more than one potential client to her. We were on reasonably friendly terms, but I didn’t need to hear about yet another thing she did better than me.

“OK,” I announced. “Here’s our tally so far. Twelve people wore black capes or cloaks. If you subtract me and Aaron, that leaves ten. The magician was Harry from Classifieds, and he went home with his wife around nine-forty-five. So Harry is out. Ditto Batman, the product manager from Microsoft, who had another party to go to that night. That leaves eight people.

The Three Musketeers were delivery drivers for the Sentinel, and they left early to go drinking together in Pioneer Square. That leaves five. The DJ was a monk, but he was sitting out in public all night. Four.”

“What about breaks?” asked Zack. He shut down Eddie’s computer. “DJs take breaks.”

“True. Do you think he could have killed Mercedes and then gone back to playing music?” I shivered. It was too easy to make this into an intellectual puzzle and shy away from the thought of what one of these people actually did, there in the darkened corridor. “All right, Rick the Rocket stays on the list, at least until I get him on the phone and ask him some questions. Where was I?”

Zack pulled his chair closer to mine. He smelled like soap. Nice soap. “Five.”

“Right. The other four are Darth Vader, Dracula, the pregnant nun, and the Grim Reaper. What a crew.”

“Darth Vader was Doug Rawls,” Zack pointed out. “No way did he do it.”

“No, I don’t suppose he did.” Rawls, the paper’s copy editor, had cerebral palsy. He’d spent most of the night sitting quietly aside, his black helmet on his knee, enjoying the spectacle of his coworkers cavorting.

“OK, I’ll cross him off. We still don’t know who Dracula was, but one of the bartenders saw him just before midnight, so he stays on the list. The nun was Angela, and she was definitely at the party right till the end, because I saw her leaving. But I just can’t see her as a murderer. Can you?”

“She seems really nice,” said Zack doubtfully. “But—”

“Yeah, but.” But someone had killed Mercedes, and tumbled Corinne into the harbor. “All right, we’ll keep Angela. That just leaves—”

“Death,” said Zack.

“Death.” I drew a black box around the last name on my list. “We don’t know for sure that Soper was at the party after eleven, but we don’t know that he wasn’t, and he hasn’t returned my calls. Aaron thinks he did it because Mercedes knew about… knew something incriminating about him.” I remembered just in time that Aaron wanted the bribery issue kept secret. Not that I gave a damn about Aaron Gold anymore. “But why would Soper attack Corinne?”

Zack frowned. “Maybe Corinne knows the incriminating stuff, too? Except I didn’t think she and Mercedes ever worked on the same kind of stories.”

“No. And besides, Corinne would have said something if she had an enemy at the party. Wait, we’re getting into motives again. Let’s just concentrate on who and when, like we’ve been doing, and let the police worry about why.”

“OK,” said Zack. He started decorating my list with doodles as he talked: crescent moons and rocket ships. No hearts with arrows through them, fortunately for my composure. “So, like, we need to find someone who knows if Syd Soper stayed late. And also keep asking if anybody saw someone follow Corinne down the pier.”

“And who on earth Dracula was.” I wiped the tomato sauce off my fingers and picked up the phone. But I got the same old answer.

“Thank you for calling Characters, Inc., Seattle’s finest costume shop. We’re taking a vacation after Halloween, but if you leave your name and number—”

I’d already left them a couple of messages, so I hung up, but it rang right away.

“Hi, Carnegie? It’s Angela. I think I’ve got the wrong dress. Does yours come with this weird bra?”

I laughed, glad to think about something frivolous. “That sounds like mine. Let me call you back.”

I ran downstairs and checked the garment bag from Stephanie’s Styles hanging on the back of my bedroom door. Sure enough, the pink gown inside had a strip of tape on the shoulder marked SIMS. When I went back up to the office, Zack had finished the pizza and was poking through the candy dish out in the good room.

“The ones in red wrappers are the best,” I told him. “Want to go see Angela with me? Maybe she can tell us something.”

We took my rented tin can down to the Harbor Steps complex on First Avenue, where condos rise high above trendy restaurants and antique shops. Zack spotted a parking space not too far from Angela’s building, and carried the garment bag for me. We cut across the polished granite steps, which lead up from the waterfront to the Seattle Art Museum on Second, and serve as a long slanting public plaza for outdoor concerts and lunchtime picnics.

No picnics today, with the gray skies and the chill, but a valiant street-corner fiddler had drawn a little audience. We paused to listen, and Zack shyly dropped a dollar in the open instrument case. Zack’s fuse might be short and his conversation might be limited, especially compared to Aaron’s, but he was pleasant to have around.

“Must be cool living right downtown,” he said as we rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor. “She could have walked home from the Aquarium.”

I remembered Angela laughing as she left the party. In innocent merriment, or in guilty relief at getting away with murder? When she opened her door to us, smiling like a cheerleader, wearing electric-purple leotards and a messy
ponytail, the idea seemed absurd. Although Aaron was right: she did look strong.

“Hey, thanks,” she said, turning off the exercise video she had running on a big flat-screen TV in the corner. “But I could have come to your office. Hi, Zack.”

“No problem,” I told her. “We needed to get out for a breather.”

“Oh, really?” Angela pulled on a purple sweatshirt. “I didn’t know you two were—”

“A breather from working on the web site for my business,” I said firmly. “That’s all.”

She tilted her head archly. “Whatever. I’ll get your dress.”

While she was gone, I crossed the cheery, cluttered living room to a pair of sliding glass doors, drawn by the view From the tiny balcony with its tiny potted junipers you looked south over downtown, past the faded old brick buildings of Pioneer Square and the stark new baseball and football stadiums, to green hills and the soft gray horizon.

“You can see Mount Rainier from here when it’s clear,” said Angela, returning with the other Stephanie’s Styles bag. “Sunrise and sunset both. Incredible! It’s why I bought the place. And now that Microsoft has a building downtown, I don’t have that awful commute.”

It was quite a panorama, but even through the glass I could hear the traffic noise a dozen stories down. Give me the lapping of lake water anytime. Angela swapped garment bags with Zack, dropped hers over the back of a chair, and looked pointedly back at her VCR.

“Well, thanks again.”

Zack turned to go but I lingered. “Angela, at the Aquarium that night—”

“Yes?” Angela’s eyes were a light, clear hazel, with glints of gold. Innocent-looking eyes.

“Did you happen to see Syd Soper, the man dressed as Death, during the last part of the party? Bald guy in a black robe, with a long sickle?”

“The one who was dancing with Mercedes?” The eyes were troubled now. “Carnegie, do you think he killed her?”

“I don’t think anything, honestly. We’re just trying to sort some things out. Did you see him, say, after eleven?”

She nodded, slowly and dramatically. “He was in the Dome room right near the end. Almost everybody was dancing, you know, for the last dance, but he just stood and watched. He had a really spooky look on his face, too.”

Zack and I exchanged glances. Death was still on the list.

“What about Corinne?” I said. “Did you see Soper anywhere near her, or following her?”

“You mean when she went off by herself? No. But you don’t really believe she got pushed in the water, do you? Elizabeth thinks she jumped.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, sending her ponytail swinging. “She’s kind of strange, isn’t she? Well, I’ve got to finish working out, OK? Thanks for bringing the dress.”

And with that, Angela hurried us out the door.

“Funny how urgent that workout was, all of a sudden,” I commented to Zack in the car. I meant to try Characters, Inc. again, but I’d left my cell phone in my other bag. That was getting to be a bad habit. Sighing, I promised myself to get extra-organized as soon as I got Vanna back. Not having my own wheels was throwing everything off.

“Yeah,” said Zack, his brow furrowing. I found myself wishing I had eyelashes like his, long and curly. “She was,
like, so quick to jump to conclusions. I mean, you didn’t even say we suspected Soper.”

“No, I didn’t, did I? She just assumed he was capable of murder. Or she wanted us to assume it. And she acted funny about Corinne, too, as if—Who’s that?”

A bulky figure, made even bulkier by a huge navy pea coat, was stomping up and down the dock near my front door. Shaggy black hair, bull-like shoulders, and an almost visible aura of hysterical indignation. Who else?

“Hi there, Boris.”

“Those Buckmeister people!” he thundered. “They make me betty!”

“What about Betty?”

“They are driving me betty with their poinsettias, their meeny poinsettias! Kharnegie, there is no such thing as a meeny poinsettia! You said ruby amaryllis, I have supplier for glorious ruby amaryllis, hypericum berries like jewels, perfect for Christmas wedding! Poinsettia is trite, is vulgar! I am not a vulgar man!”

That was debatable, but it was raining again and this was not the place to debate.

“Boris, come upstairs and calm down. Zack, this is Boris Nevsky Zack Hartmann.” They shook hands, Boris still smoldering and Zack looking startled, as well he might. I led the way upstairs. “So I take it the Buckmeisters came to see you?”

“They would not leave,” Boris said tragically. He collapsed onto the wicker loveseat, which cried out for mercy. “I came to you, to get away from them! So cheerful, and all the time talking. You must keep them away from me, Kharnegie!”