Died To Match Part 3

"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 Sh.o.r.es, 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 a.s.sume that Mr. Barry had been lying by the pillar for some time?"

"Well, long enough to sit down and then pa.s.s 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 m.u.f.fled 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 G.o.d." I pictured again the b.l.o.o.d.y 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-p.r.o.ng 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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."

Chapter Six.

MY 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!"

"Buck, please, can you come back later? Or wait in your car?" I hardly knew what I was saying; all I could think of was Tommy. "I have to talk with Lieutenant Graham-"

"We're done," said Graham, nodding at Officer Lee, who gathered up their jackets and went to the door. "If we could just pick up that one item?"

"Sure. Um, folks, I'll be right back. You go ahead with your lunch."

Lee hurried down to my front door, but I halted Graham on the covered landing at the head of the stairs. The rain formed a hissing silver curtain around us.

"Tommy drove away from the Aquarium?" I demanded. "In his condition?"

"Apparently," said Graham. "He only got a few blocks. Fortunately, no other vehicles were involved."

"Will he be all right? Is he going to live?"

"Unknown." The detective was watching me closely, and his expression softened. "You're a friend of his?"

I recalled the old sportswriter beaming at Zack by the dance floor, and kissing my hand in the Sentinel newsroom back when Aaron first introduced us, and his pleased and proud surprise when Paul asked him to be best man. A charming, exasperating fellow, Tommy Barry.

"Yes, we're friends."

"I'm sorry to bring you the bad news, then. Look, Ms. Kincaid, a murder scene can be pretty traumatic. We have a Victim a.s.sistance section; they can help you with counseling and so forth. Let me have someone call you-"

"No, thank you, I'll be OK. My best therapy will be getting back to work."

"All right, then. Let's get that money."

Graham and Lee waited in the kitchen while I retrieved the little bundle of bills from my witch's gown, which was still on the bathroom floor. As he counted out the money on the kitchen table, and Officer Lee prepared a receipt, I began to get goose b.u.mps. There were tens and twenties, all right, but several fifties, not just one, and the inside of the roll was all hundred-dollar bills.

"Two thousand, nine hundred and fifty dollars," said Graham. "Not exactly pocket change, is it?"

"That's bizarre! Why was she carrying so much cash at a party?"

Graham was really very good at not answering questions. He signed the receipt and handed it to me along with his card. "Call me if you change your mind about Victim a.s.sistance. Meanwhile, we'll get a statement typed up for you to sign. And Ms. Kincaid, it's important that you don't discuss the details of the case with anyone."

"What do you mean, details?"

"Cause of death, condition of the body, Mr. Barry's presence at the scene, and so forth. That won't be released to the press just yet. For now, a party guest was found dead, that's all."

"Of course. Whatever you say."

After they left, I went back to hang up the gown, just until I could get it to a dry cleaners. As I lifted the crumpled black folds, I heard a faint clatter against the tiles of the bathroom floor, and remembered: Mercedes' powder compact. I pulled out the little square of black enamel and gold trim, and felt tears welling up. Just a bit of female frippery. Souvenir of a dead woman. I took a shaky breath, set the compact gently on a shelf, and returned upstairs to discuss details of a very different sort with Buck, Betty, and Bonnie.

The Buckmeisters were a living, laughing, hollering argument for charging an hourly rate instead of a commission. I figured that by the time Bonnie said "I do," Buck and Betty would have paid me about fourteen cents an hour for my services. They popped in to see me almost daily, had me pursue every new fad and feature that showed up in the magazines or on-line, and changed their minds as often as Buck changed the bandannas that he invariably wore, pirate-fashion, wrapped around his broad red forehead and knotted in back above his scraggly gray ponytail. Today's bandanna was blue with yellow polka dots. Buck was from El Paso, where he'd made a fortune in hot tubs, and moving to Seattle hadn't changed him one little bit, no siree.

Daughter Bonnie was to be a Christmas bride, and we'd already worked through four or five entire scenarios for the wedding, from food to flowers to music, each of them increasingly Yule-ish. The only constants were the church and country club sites, the ornate wedding gown, and the invisible groom. Invisible to me, that is, because he'd been out of the country for the entire planning process, setting up a computer center for his company in Milan. I hoped he wouldn't throw me any curves at the last moment. It was remarkable enough for a father of the bride to be as immersed in wedding minutiae as Buck was; grooms and dads usually just showed up and said "Yes, dear."

"Yes, dear," Buck was saying now. "I did too bring the chicken, it's in this bag, no it isn't, wait a darn minute, here it is! Carnegie, we brought you your favorite!"

"You eat up, dear, and we'll tell you this wonderful idea we've had about the bridesmaids," said his wife. Betty's hair was dyed black as patent leather, and permed into curlicues that framed her round, kindly face just like a painted doll's. "Instead of bouquets they could carry little silk purses, dyed to match their shoes, with flowers peeking out the top. Wouldn't that just be sweet?"

I sank into a wicker chair, wondering how Boris would respond to yet another change in plan. "Very sweet. I bet you have a picture to show me."

"As a matter of fact, we do!" Bonnie was the round, curly image of her mother, amplified with some of her father's height and heft. "We found this at the library. Look!"

She opened a glossy volume auth.o.r.ed by the sort of florist-to-the-stars that Boris claimed to disdain and, I suspected, secretly envied. The thought of Boris brought Corinne's face, deathly pale, floating before my eyes. Should someone tell Boris about her fall, or would she be embarra.s.sed if he knew? d.a.m.n her anyway for being so melodramatic.

"See?" said Bonnie. "It's a bride's purse in the picture, but all the girls could carry them, and we'd have Christmas flowers instead of these tiny little pansies or whatever they are."

"Primroses!" Buck boomed. "Caption says they're primroses and forget-me-nots. Hmph. I'd like to see anybody forget my little Bonnie. Anyhow, we'd want holly and mistletoe, wouldn't we, to keep it Christma.s.sy, or maybe poinsettias?"

Betty squealed at her husband in affectionate glee. "Why, Father, you know how big a purse you'd need for a poinset-tia? We'd have bridesmaids with tote bags!"

"Well, little poinsettias then. Carnegie, can't your Russian fella come up with some kinda mini-poinsettias?"

"Amaryllis," I said faintly. My head was swimming. Conversing with the Buckmeisters was odd at any time, but utterly surrealistic today. "We had planned on ruby-red amaryl-lis blossoms, with cedar fronds and red hyperic.u.m berries. If you don't want them we really need to let Boris know."

"Oh, that's right," sighed Bonnie. "I do like those amaryl-lises. Well, we'll decide later. Oh! And I saw this article about tiaras. They say a tiara can be a bride's crowning glory. Carnegie, I could wear a tiara!"

"Well, yes, you could. Although we have already ordered your headpiece and veil." Twice, in fact. We've ordered everything for this b.l.o.o.d.y wedding at least twice.

Bonnie knit her brows. "Maybe a tiara on top of the veil?"

I smiled inwardly at the notion of all that sparkle and drama perched above Bonnie's rosy, sweet-natured face. A tiara calls for a woman with a certain confident carriage, a certain aristocratic air... a woman like Mercedes Montoya. Suddenly Bonnie's voice faded to a distant murmur, as the events of last night crowded around me, and I knew if I sat still much longer I was going to lose it.

"Folks, could you excuse me for just another minute?"

I went into the workroom and closed the connecting door behind me. "Eddie, if you love me, go out and talk to the Buckmeisters."

"Oh, no," he said, his feet planted on his desk and an unlit cigar clamped in his teeth. No smoking in the workroom, by order of the proprietor. "Ohhh, no, not the Killer B's. If you're too shook up to work, then get rid of 'em and take the day off."

"I'm not shaken up; I'm going to Harborview"

"What the h.e.l.l for?"

"Tommy Barry's had a drunk-driving accident, I want to try and see him. Please, Eddie, just take some notes and don't promise them anything for sure until I check it out."

He grumbled, but he did it, and within minutes I was fleeing through the downpour to climb into Vanna. As I drove, Tommy's voice sounded in my head: "You're killing her!" But who? Who had he seen with Mercedes, and did that person know they'd been seen? Was there someone out there hoping that Tommy never woke up? Or planning to make sure that he didn't? The police should be guarding him. The morning news had only hinted at foul play and said nothing of witnesses, but if the killer knew about Tommy, he could easily track him down.

I maneuvered into a tight spot behind a pillar in the hospital's underground garage, and fumbled in my purse to be sure I had Graham's card handy. I could call him from the lobby after I'd seen Tommy. A grandmotherly volunteer told me what floor Mr. Barry was on, then began to say something about restricted visiting. I didn't stay to listen.

Hospitals try so hard to be efficient and cheery, like office buildings crossed with day-care centers. Soothing water-colors, potted plants, even espresso carts, for revving up the staff and calming down the visitors. But every time I enter one of those double-wide, slow-moving elevators with their indefinable hospital smell, I can taste Styrofoam and the thin, bitter vending-machine coffee that Mom and I drank by the quart at St. Luke's, in Boise, as my father failed to recover from his third heart surgery.

Dad gave me my red hair and also my name. He had educated himself in the public libraries endowed by Andrew Carnegie, and conveniently overlooked the fact that old Andy was a robber baron. But Dad gave me so much more, and I still missed him. Mom and I practically lived at the hospital, that last time. She knew all the nurses' names, and I knew every waiting-room watercolor by heart. Dad was buried in the veterans' cemetery there in Boise. Mom went to see him every Sunday.

The elevator began to fill, and I squeezed back in the corner and tried hard to think of something else. You couldn't get more "else" than the Buckmeisters, so I thought about them, and the Great Christmas Cake Conundrum. The dinner menu was shaping up fine; Joe Solveto was planning on roasted halibut with a macadamia crust and mango chutney, and he was fine-tuning a vegetarian entree as well. But the Killer B's wanted the cake to be a special event in itself, some kind of colossal Christmas concoction that they couldn't quite describe, but they'd know it when they saw it.