Died to Match
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Luke Skywalker was juggling martini glasses. Albert
Einstein was dirty-dancing with Monica Lewinsky.
And Zorro was arguing with Death himself. For wedding planner Carnegie Kincaid, it was just another
night on the job: a coed bachelor party thrown by
one of Seattle’s hippest couples. But what started as
the perfect evening ended in disaster: one beautiful
bridesmaid was dead, and another had thrown herself
into Elliot Bay.
With families to please, dresses to hem, and headlines to grab, Carnegie is discovering the dark side of
love and marriage amid high and low Seattle society—
and that while some passions may be forever, some
are a motive for murder...
“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.”
May the Best
Man Die
on sale now
Carnegie Kincaid plans weddings, not stag parties.
When a client asks Carnegie to manage a pre-wedding blow-out—complete with a stripper—she
tactfully refuses the job. So why is Carnegie peering
through binoculars across the Seattle Ship Canal,
watching a shapely Santa Claus turn naked inside a
hip dockside bistro?
Because her own significant other—with whom
she is having some significant differences—is at the
party too. And so, it turns out, is a killer...
THE MINUTE I PUT DOWN THE PHONE, I GRABBED the binoculars and focused on the Hot Spot for a second look. Not that I cared whether Aaron was inside. Not that I cared about Aaron at all.
Not that I could see him, either. Santa had left the lighted window, and the revelers milled aimlessly inside, as if the party were winding down. I spotted Mr. Garlic, but no one else familiar—until a flurry of movement drew my attention to the grassy slope below the deck.
There in the silvery frost and the tilted shadows, two long-limbed figures were struggling together, dodging and flailing in clumsy counterpoint. I had no trouble recognizing them as the best man and Lily’s baby brother. Jason Kraye was obviously drunk; maybe Darwin was the designated driver, trying to take his car keys away?
But you don’t punch people to get their car keys,
I thought. And then,
Maybe you do, if you’re young
and male.
It was hard to tell if this was a ritual scuffle—elk clashing their antlers—or a serious fight. Either way, I can’t say it bothered me to see the supercilious Jason getting knocked around a little.
The third figure was less ambiguous: Frank Sanjek, the bridegroom, was kneeling on the grass near the two combatants and vomiting hideously, his head jerking and lolling.
Another male ritual.
I smiled ruefully. Time for me to go home.
But once I went downstairs and gathered up my things, a nagging doubt stopped me from walking out the door. I had assured Lily that her brother was fine, and now he was apparently in the middle of a fistfight. Shouldn’t I check on the outcome?
For that matter, shouldn’t I make sure that the amiable, sensible bridegroom wasn’t unconscious and abandoned by his drunken friends, out in the freezing night? Eddie tells me I fuss too much about our clients, and maybe it’s true. But I was eager to see Sally Tyler walk down the aisle and out of my life on New Year’s Eve, and to that end, I needed Frank Sanjek safe and sound.
So I dashed up to the storeroom, hurried over to the worktable, and raised the binoculars to my eyes for the third and last time.
There was even less to see than before. Some of the café’s windows had gone dark, making it hard to get a clear view into the shrubbery. But at least Frank was on his feet; I watched him stagger to the sliding door and wrench it open. I didn’t spot Darwin, or Jason either, but they might have already left.
The stripper was just leaving, striding briskly up the sidewalk, head up and shoulders back after a job well done. And someone else was working his way down through the bushes toward the bike path, but I couldn’t make out his face, or whether he had a bicycle waiting for him. The guys were supposed to take cabs or buses home instead of driving, but even a bike could be dangerous—
“Bird-watching?”
I jumped, and Eddie’s binoculars slipped from my suddenly clumsy fingers, to land in the silver punch bowl with an enormous and resounding
gonnng.
I was shocked, and not just because a man had suddenly materialized in the doorway. I was shocked by who it was. Aaron Gold.
Unlike the younger party guests, Aaron wore a tie. But it hung loose from his collar and his crow-black hair was mussed. My former suitor’s deep-set brown eyes gleamed glassily, and when he smiled, the familiar swift white grin came out lopsided. Even from where I stood, halfway across the room, I could smell the combination of cigar smoke and retsina.
So he
was
shooting pool in the other room. And
then afterward, he must have been watching Santa...
“No birds at night,” said Aaron, shaking his head sagely. A lock of hair flopped down into his eyes. “I know! S’ Christmas. You’re gonna find out who’s naughty or nice. Merry Christmas, Stretch.”
I stood with my back to the reverberating punch bowl and took a deep, shaky breath. I didn’t know how long Aaron had been watching me, or whether he guessed that I’d been spying on Santa’s striptease earlier. I also didn’t know how I felt about him, after the last few weeks of angry silence and unwilling tears.
And what neither of us knew, and wouldn’t learn until the next day, was this: of the three young men I had observed on the grass behind the Hot Spot Café, only two were still alive.
About the Author
DEBORAH DONNELLY is a sea captain’s daughter who grew up in Panama, Cape Cod, and points in between. She’s been an executive speechwriter, a university librarian, a science fiction writer, and a nanny. A longtime resident of Seattle and a bloomingly healthy breast cancer survivor, Donnelly now lives physically in Boise, Idaho, and virtually at
www.deborahdonnelly.org
.
Also by Deborah Donnelly
Veiled Threats
Died to Match
May the Best Man Die
DEATH TAKES A HONEYMOON
A Dell Book / May 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Deborah Wessell
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-42287-3
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