Died to Match (5 page)

“Tommy Barry, he’s over by the pillar. He’s drunk. He said ‘You’re killing her,’ and then he passed out.”

But Tommy, it seemed, was also long gone. He must have slipped out the exit to the dock, and gone around to the street on the outside walkway. I was asked urgently for his description, which I provided, and for a description of his car, which I’d never seen. Some officers left in a hurry, and only then did Lieutenant Graham ask me about finding Mercedes. I made a calm, step-by-step statement, and when it was done I erupted into sobs.

Graham watched me mournfully for a minute, then dispatched Marvin to take me home. I made a stop at the ladies’ room to scrub off the blood. Marvin came in with me, and a good thing. As the pink-tinged water spiraled slowly down the drain, I nearly fainted clean away.

“Carnegie, you all right?”

“Sure. Fine. No problem.” I clutched the counter, gulping air. Mercedes had stood here, only hours before, vain and scheming and alive. My newest almost-client. She would have made a glorious bride. We could have woven flowers into her hair.

“I just want to get out of here.”

But first we had a gauntlet to run: a little crowd of reporters at the building entrance, barking at us like dogs. How had they found out so quickly? There were more camera flashes, blinding in the darkness, and a dozen shouted questions.

“Who got killed?”

“Officer, can you tell us what happened?”

“Miss, did you see anything? Miss, what’s your name? Hey, Miss!”

“Hey, Stretch!”

One of the baying newshounds had a familiar face. Aaron. He reached out to me, but there was a pencil in his hand and a question on his lips. Not you, too. I turned away, disgusted. He’d always be a reporter first, and a friend—or a lover?—second. If I needed some direction about our relationship, I’d just gotten it. Marvin hustled me into Vanna and drove me home.

Home is a houseboat on Lake Union, with Made in Heaven’s two-room office on the upper floor. The houseboat itself has seen better days, but my slip is priceless: right at the end of the dock with a view of downtown Seattle to the south and Gas Works Park to the north, and a constant parade of watercraft and waterfowl in between. Renting home and office in one waterborne package had been just barely affordable when I started Made in Heaven, and now with the dock fees escalating and Vanna in need of round-the-clock nursing, I was perpetually broke. But I loved my shabby little place, and I’d never been so glad to see it as tonight.

Marvin walked me to my door, along the worn wooden planks of the dock. I assured him one last time that I didn’t need a friend to come stay with me, so he called in to the station for a pickup and went out to the parking lot to wait. Numb with exhaustion and shock, I stepped out of my gory witch’s gown and left it on the bathroom floor. With my last bit of energy, I called up to the office and left a message for Eddie to hear in the morning. Then I crawled under the covers and fell fathoms deep into dreamless sleep.

The next morning it was raining, a dense mournful rain that drummed on the wooden stairway as I trudged up to the office, and sheeted down the picture windows of Made in Heaven’s reception area. The “good room,” with its fresh paint and wicker love seats, was where I met with clients to
talk cakes and bouquets. To help them daydream. The workroom, through a connecting door, was all secondhand desks and file cabinets, but boasted the same stellar view of the lake. Eddie rarely met with the clients—he objected to marriage, and therefore to weddings, or so he claimed—but this morning he stood in the good room pouring coffee for Lieutenant Graham and a dimpled young Asian-American woman in police uniform, who sat stiffly with a notebook on her lap.

Eddie Breen and my father had been inseparable, back in their hell-raising merchant marine days. He’s little and leathery, with fine white hair, a limited but immaculate wardrobe, and a tetchy disposition. Eddie keeps my books and negotiates my vendor contracts and bosses me around, and I let him, I guess, because Dad’s no longer alive to do it. He looked me over as I came in, his steel-gray eyes on high beam.

“Carnegie! Sit down before you fall down. Have some coffee. You look like ten miles of bad road.”

Coming from Eddie, this was a wealth of tender solicitude. I accepted a cup and sat across from Graham, who wore a jacket and tie, with wingtips nicely polished and crinkly brown hair neatly combed. He looked like a well-groomed, disappointed man who’d been up all night. After introducing Officer Lee, he turned to Eddie.

“Thank you, Mr. Breen,” he said, in polite but positive dismissal. “You’ve been very helpful.”

Eddie rose. “I’ll get back to answering the phone, then. Carnegie, I’ve been saying ‘No comment’ to everybody. That OK?”

“Perfect. If you need to, just put it on the answering machine and let it ring.”

He nodded and turned back to Graham. “Don’t go getting her all upset. She’s got work to do.”

Officer Lee smiled to herself, but Graham just nodded solemnly as my fire-breathing champion left us. I barely waited for the workroom door to close before I demanded, “Lieutenant, have you talked to Tommy? Did he recognize the murderer? Who was it?”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” said Graham, as if I hadn’t spoken. “What time did you arrive at the Aquarium last night?”

“What does it matter what time I arrived! What did Tommy say?”

“Ms. Kincaid,” he said quietly. “This is not a conversation. It’s a witness interview in a homicide investigation. Please cooperate.”

So I did. Graham asked me about my relationship with Mercedes, and if I knew of anyone who might have wanted to harm her. Then he had me reconstruct the events of the party, hour by hour. He unfolded a visitor’s map of the Aquarium on the glass-topped table that usually holds bridal magazines and photographers’ portfolios, and I traced my movements on it, with approximate times. Marvin reported closing off the shorebird corridor at about eleven
P.M.,
which jibed with my recollection of when I’d radioed my request to him.

“So Mercedes must have been killed after eleven?” I speculated. But I got no response from Graham. “The corridor would have been too public before then. Either she crossed the rope barrier with someone else, or she went alone and the murderer followed her. Don’t you think?”

Still no response, except for more of his steady, methodical questions. “You say that Ms. Montoya invited Sydney Soper to dance with her. Did she remain with him for the rest of the evening?”

“I have no idea, Lieutenant. I spoke with her briefly just
before I radioed Marvin to close off Northwest Shores, and I don’t think I saw her at all after that. Or him either. But that doesn’t mean they were together.”

“What exactly did you do between eleven o’clock and the time you discovered the body?”

I described my circuit through the party, my dance with Zack, the people I recalled seeing on the dance floor, and then meeting Aaron on the stairs and going out on the pier with him. All the while, Officer Lee scribbled away. Graham seemed unsurprised by Corinne’s fall into the harbor; maybe it happened all the time at waterfront parties. I continued on, explaining about my final walk-through routine, and mentioning Aaron’s departure. This time I managed to describe the corpse without tears.

I thought we were finally finished, but instead, the detective began to skip around in the chronology of the party, repeating questions he’d already asked, probing at my memory like a man with a poker stirring at a fire. It’s surprising what you can remember if someone asks the right way. Graham coaxed out details I hadn’t even registered at the time, like the triangular gap in the rocks near Mercedes’ shoulder—the source of the murder weapon, I surmised, though he wouldn’t say—and the damp patch of drool on Tommy’s leprechaun jacket.

“Would you assume that Mr. Barry had been lying by the pillar for some time?”

“Well, long enough to sit down and then pass out, but it might not have taken long. I expect he was pretty well plowed when he first arrived. Marvin was at the front entrance, he could tell you.”

“He already has. I’m double-checking. Mr. Breen gave us the guest list, and we’ll be interviewing everyone on it, as well as the staff from Solveto’s and the cleaning firm and so
forth.” The lieutenant smiled sorrowfully. “Too bad it wasn’t a smaller party. Let’s go back to your encounter with Ms. Montoya in the rest room. Was she taking drugs?”

“What?!”

“It’s a simple question.” Graham sat remarkably still and composed, as if he could do this all day. I suppose he often did. Outside, the rain went on raining, a muffled drumroll against the windows.

“I… didn’t see her doing anything like that.” Of course, I suspected that Mercedes blabbed about Talbot only because she was high. But suspicions aren’t facts. “Why do you ask? Were there drugs in her system?”

As before, he ignored me. “You said the two of you talked a bit. What about, exactly?”

I was dreading this question. I’d deliberately glossed over the conversation in my step-by-step account. Mercedes had confided in me—I thought of her now as one of my brides— and it seemed cruel to expose her private life. But facts are facts. And murder is murder.

“She told me she was engaged to be married. To Roger Talbot.”

Graham was startled, though he hid it well, merely elevating one eyebrow a millimeter or two. His voice stayed level. “That’s… quite a piece of news.”

“She said it was a secret, no one knew about it yet.”

“Did you believe her?”

“Well, I didn’t think she bought that ring herself.”

“Which ring? She was wearing several.”

“That was all costume jewelry. She had a diamond ring on a long chain around her neck. She waved it at me and then hid it down her blouse….”

Lightning struck both of us at once. Graham leaned forward. “There was no diamond ring on the corpse.”

“Oh, my God.” I pictured again the bloody rent in Mercedes’ skull, the vulnerable nape of her neck. “No. No, it was gone. I should have realized that last night—”

“Never mind. Can you describe it?”

I closed my eyes and took a breath to steady myself. “A marquise diamond, between two and three-quarter and three carats. Six-prong setting. Pear-cut side stones. Platinum band engraved with leaves. I’m not sure of the size on the side stones, maybe half a carat apiece.”

“Ginny call that in. And find out if Talbot’s in his office today.” She went to the window and spoke quietly into her cell phone. Graham was looking at me curiously. “She waved it at you and you saw all that?”

I shrugged. “It’s my business.”

“Really. And you didn’t see any sign of it when you found her? No ring, no gold chain?”

“No. But maybe if you search the exhibit—”

“Ms. Kincaid, we are sifting the goddamn sand, grain by grain. Excuse my French.” He sighed heavily. “So she asked you to plan her wedding. Was she happy about this secret engagement? Any anger at Talbot for keeping it secret?”

“She seemed fine with it, as far as I could tell. She was kind of… excitable.”

“Excitable. What was she excited about?” Graham’s tired brown eyes were expressionless, but I could sense the active intelligence behind them as he weighed my words.

“Well, about Talbot’s running for mayor, and about their wedding. She was very insistent that I agree to work for her. She even gave me some cash as a deposit.”

This brought both eyebrows up. “Cash? How much cash?”

“I don’t really know. I didn’t want to take it out and count it during the party, and then after I found her I forgot all about it. It’s still in the pocket of my costume.”

Another sigh. First the ring, now this. I was definitely flunking Witness 101. “Ms. Kincaid, we’ll need to take the money in as evidence. You’ll be given a receipt. All right?”

“Of course.” But still, she meant to hire me. She meant to be my bride.

“Let’s go back to Mr. Barry. Tell me again what he said.”

I shifted in my chair. Wicker’s not that comfortable. “Tommy said ‘Stop it.’ I think he said that twice. And then he said ‘You’re killing her!’”

“So he believed that you had killed Ms. Montoya?”

“Is that what he told you? Lieutenant, Tommy couldn’t even focus his eyes at that point, he was dead drunk! I think he must have been repeating something he’d said earlier, during the murder.”

“And yet if he had spoken out earlier, the killer would hardly have left him alive as a witness.”

“Well maybe he didn’t say it out loud, except later, to me, only he didn’t know it was me, he was just raving! Look, I know you’re supposed to be cagey about testimony, but please tell me, who did Tommy see? Did he recognize the murderer?”

Graham stood up. “We’d very much like to know that ourselves. Unfortunately, after leaving the crime scene, Mr. Barry drove his car into a concrete abutment under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. He’s currently in intensive care at Harborview In a coma.”

M
Y MOUTH AND THE OFFICE DOOR SWUNG OPEN SIMULTANEOUSLY
. Nothing emerged from me—I was too stunned—but what emerged through the door was a large rosy-cheeked man, his medium-sized rosy-cheeked daughter, and his diminutive but equally rosy-cheeked wife. You could have fit one inside the other inside the other, like those painted Russian dolls. All three were dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and “I Love Seattle” sweatshirts, and laden with damp Nordstrom’s bags, Starbucks cups, bridal magazines, and paper cartons of what smelled like rain-soaked kung-pao chicken.

“Carnegie!” hollered the man. He managed to laugh and holler simultaneously. “I know we don’t have an appointment, but we brought you lunch to make up for it! You need to eat more, girl, you’re thin as a fence rail, isn’t she, Mother?”

He rotated like a benevolent lighthouse to beam at my other visitors, shedding parcels on the table as he seized Graham’s hand with both oversized paws and pumped it fervently.

“Bruce Buckmeister! Call me Buck! My wife Betty, my daughter Bonnie! Hey, congratulations! Is this your blushing bride?” He leered roguishly at Officer Lee, who stood frozen at the window trying to keep a straight face. “The bride wore a nightstick, how ’bout that! Better not leave her at the altar or she’ll bust you!”