Bride and Doom Read online

  Lately Aaron had almost lost his self-consciousness about the scar. He certainly seemed unaware of it tonight—and all too aware of Boris Nevsky. He cocked his head and gave me a quizzical look.

  “There you are, Stretch. Doing a postgame wrap-up with your coach?”

  “Not exactly.” I moved away from Boris. “Aren’t you going to bat?”

  Aaron had been quite a pitcher himself in college and was a lifelong follower of the Boston Red Sox, with a sideline as a Navigator fan.

  “Nah, the line’s too long.”

  He shrugged, and a lock of hair fell across his eyes. I reached out to lift it into place with my fingertips. Aaron Gold was a little shorter than me, and a lot more cynical, and much given to wisecracks when I wanted to be serious. Oh, and when we first met he neglected to mention that he was married, with his divorce not quite final.

  But it was final now, and Aaron was also charming and sexy and whip-smart—and almost as short-tempered as I was. We’d been bickering even more since he proposed, but surely that was just prewedding nerves. I’d gone down for the third time over this guy, and I didn’t plan on coming up again. Ever.

  “So,” he was saying, as he smiled at Holly and raised a suspicious eyebrow at Boris, “I thought I’d go get some dinner.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. “I’m starving. I’ve been here since breakfast and—Hi there, Beau.”

  My temporary employer was bearing down on me like a well-tailored Parisian freight train. With his dark wavy hair and bottomless blue eyes, Beau Paliere was even handsomer than Rob Harmon. But infinitely less agreeable.

  “You think you are a guest?” he hissed, his handsome nostrils flaring theatrically. “You work for me!”

  Some of the guests waiting to bat turned to look at us. Beau clutched my elbow almost painfully and marched me down into the home team dugout, where the long wooden players’ bench was empty.

  “I tell you to watch ’Oneysuckle,” he said, his voice low and furious, “but instead you come down and play games!”

  “Honeysuckle’s fine, dammit!” I yanked my arm away. I was tired of being manhandled tonight. “She’s up in the suite with her friends from the band. Everything’s under control.”

  Famous last words.

  “’Scuse me, Mr. Palliser?” Eugene, a gray-haired security guard, peered down at us from the dugout railing. “There’s a young lady in the suite making kind of a fuss. I wonder if you could come up and—That’s her, that’s the lady!”

  He whipped his head around as shouts and shrieks of laughter echoed from across the diamond. Beau and I scrambled up the steps to look, just as three figures burst from the darkness of the hallway and sprinted into left field.

  Cries of amusement and alarm rose from our little crowd, with Gordo hollering loudest of all as one figure took the lead. This was a young woman with short-cropped hair and an even shorter skirt puffing out beneath a strapless black bustier. The bustier was cut dangerously low, so the girl’s cleavage shone white in the stadium lights, and as she ran her thighs flashed pale above tall black boots.

  “Can’t catch the wind!” she screamed.

  She paused to taunt her pursuers, two young men in scruffy leather and denim. But as they closed in on her, she darted away again, laughing shrilly. Then she began to whirl in circles, face raised to the sky and arms outflung in ecstatic high spirits.

  The ecstasy didn’t last. All of a sudden the girl crash-landed, dropping to her knees with such a jolt that her breasts popped right out of the bustier.

  “Mon dieu!” cried Beau, horrified.

  It got worse. Oblivious to her wardrobe malfunction—and the rapt attention of some twenty or thirty spectators—the girl arched forward convulsively. A moment’s hideous hesitation, and then she puked up a mess of expensive hors d’oeuvres onto the sacred grass of Yesler Field.

  “That was no lady,” I said, wincing. “That was my bride.”

  Chapter Three

  “Her r-real name is Rose.”

  The bride’s father, a tall, stooped, watery-eyed man with a cheap suit and a slight stammer, regarded his daughter like a sparrow with an unexplained peacock in its nest. He stroked tenderly at her hair, chopped short and dyed midnight purple, but when she stirred on the couch, he snatched his hand away with a guilty start.

  “Rose is a nice name,” I said, trying to be comforting, and continued to dab at the girl’s feverish forehead with a moistened towel. “Rose McKinney. Very nice.”

  Rose McKinney was a sadly disheveled peacock at the moment, slumped on a couch in the office of the Navigators’ general manager. Her short tulle skirt, ballerinalike except for being jet black with a belt of silver skulls, was creased and grass-stained, and her black leather bustier showed unpleasant damp stains.

  A couple of her green-painted fingernails were broken too, and her fishnet stockings were torn in spots, but then those might have been fashion statements. Goth was Greek to me.

  There was something anomalous about Rose’s appearance, beyond the bizarre costume, but I couldn’t quite place it. Maybe it was just how young and vulnerable she looked with her eyes closed. She wasn’t unconscious—the team doctor had verified that—just too miserable or perhaps too embarrassed to face anyone after the fiasco on the field.

  Apparently it wasn’t her first fiasco.

  “She does this sometimes,” Gordo had confided to me a few minutes earlier, as we helped the stumbling girl off the grass and into the elevator. “She gets nervous or something, and then she drinks a little too much. She’ll be OK tomorrow.”

  “Sure she will.”

  The groom looked at me plaintively. “Mr. Theroux wants me to stay out there with Rob. He promised all the big shots they could bat. You’ll take care of her?”

  Leroy Theroux was the team’s general manager, a bantamweight black man with a notoriously short fuse. Even the great Gordo had to toe the line for the GM. Rob Harmon had retired the year Theroux arrived, but he treated him now with grave deference.

  “Absolutely,” I told Gordo, as I berated myself for not sticking with my bride in the first place. “I’ll find her father, and he can drive her home.”

  The bride’s father was Walter McKinney, the assistant equipment manager for the Navigators—although with his wire-rimmed glasses and thin hunched shoulders, he looked more like an assistant bookkeeper. And it turned out that he was obligated to stay till the end of the party, to supervise the disassembly of the batting cage and other matters.

  So now we were waiting, rather awkwardly, for a taxi.

  “Her mother used to call her Honeysuckle R-rose,” he went on. “Like in the song? I d-don’t understand the Hell part.”

  The office door opened then, and Leroy Theroux looked in, scowling. Some people have laugh lines, but he had scowl lines.

  “She all right?”

  “She’s fine, Mr. Theroux.” McKinney was blinking nervously. “I’ll send her home and—”

  “You damn well better! Making a show of herself like that, at a time like this. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.”

  I wanted to intervene, but the man had a point. And besides, he’d already shut the door, leaving McKinney and me to our uncomfortable silence.

  “You were saying something about Rose’s mother…?” I probed delicately. Damn that Paliere, he’d promised me a file of information on the wedding party but never produced it. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

  “My wife p-passed on,” said McKinney, with a wobble in his voice.

  “I’m so sorry. It must be difficult, raising a daughter by your—”

  “Fuck sorry.” The bride’s eyes popped open and she glowered at me. Even bloodshot and smudged they were extraordinary eyes, luminously green and tilted like a cat’s. Her mouth tightened into a curl of dark-fuchsia lipstick. “And fuck you! Who are you to be asking about my mother?”

  “Rosie, don’t,” pleaded McKinney, and turned his watery eyes to me. “She doesn’t mea
n—”

  “Sure I do, old man,” said the girl. She swung herself upright on the couch, her hair askew and the pattern of the upholstery imprinted on one cheek. “I don’t need some nosy…uhhh…”

  Her pale face went abruptly paler, and she clamped her lips tight.

  “Walter,” I said hastily, “could you go check on that cab? We’ll be downstairs in just a minute.”

  He wasn’t sorry to flee the room, and as the door shut behind him, I dragged over a wastebasket and held Rose’s head while she emptied her stomach the rest of the way. Then I slapped a water bottle into her hand, dumped the towel in her lap, and stood up, fists on hips.

  Inside the fists, my nails were digging into my palms. I was angry about Beau and Boris and Digger, but mostly about this poor man who dared to stroke his daughter’s hair. My own father had died when I was about Rose’s age, and I’d have given the world and everything in it to have him back.

  “Are you done?” I demanded.

  “Yeah.” Rose dragged the towel across her mouth and took a slug of water. With the resilience of youth, she seemed to be sobering up already, now that the toxins were out of her system. At least she sat up straighter, and her sullen glare was more focused. “It’s probably food poisoning, you know. That stinkin’ sushi was probably—”

  “Shut up.”

  “What?”

  “I said shut up. You were drunk, and you know it.”

  Rose opened her mouth in outraged protest, but I held up a hand like a traffic cop and then cocked my finger at her face.

  “I don’t want to hear a word from you unless it’s an apology. You just made a fool of yourself at an event that’s very important to your fiancé, and then you were disrespectful to your father and extremely rude to me.”

  “But—”

  “Look, if you don’t want to marry Gordo, then fine, don’t.”

  “But I do!”

  “All right, then grow up a little. Is that clear?”

  Thunderstruck, she just nodded her head and gulped. I crossed the room and hauled open the door.

  “Can you walk? Good. Let’s go.”

  I led the way along an indirect route that no one else was likely to use tonight. The hallway was curved to follow the shape of the stadium and lined with Navigators memorabilia. In stony silence we passed magazine covers and blown-up photographs, a few framed jerseys, and a wooden cradle bearing the bat that hit the first home run in Yesler Field.

  I steered clear of the commemorative bat—it had been knocked to the floor once already as the caterers wheeled in the liquor—but I gazed at the headlines and the faces as they went by, one young male face after another. Rob’s chiseled features appeared several times, and Gordo’s round jolly ones as well. Why on earth was he marrying this petulant girl?

  In the empty hallway the footfall of my lace-up flats, still dusty from my tumble at home plate, was obscured by the hostile clomping of Rose’s boots. These were knee-high Doc Martens zipped up the outside, with full-sized handcuffs as zipper pulls. Cute.

  But beneath the Honeysuckle Hell getup, Rose McKinney was just a girl—that “I do!” had sounded quite young and quite sincere—and I began to regret my harshness. She shoved her way through the double doors at the end of the corridor, and I hurried to catch up with her. As we came out onto the gallery above the stadium’s entrance rotunda, I stopped her with a hand on her elbow.

  “Why don’t I call you tomorrow afternoon,” I offered, “and we can talk about your dress.”

  Coming late to planning this wedding, I hadn’t been involved in choosing the bridal gown. That was always one of my favorite tasks—but possibly not with this bride. She didn’t reply.

  “Beau told me that your gown came in at Le Boutique,” I continued, “but now there’s some question about the style?”

  More stubborn silence from Rose, though I could hear her angry breathing in the echoing hush around us. The escalators down to the main doors were shut off for the night, and so were the flashing lights in the huge chandelier suspended above our heads. This rotunda was where the wedding reception would take place, a grand space for a grand occasion.

  The chandelier was an extraordinary construction, more than a thousand translucent baseball bats in a glittering spiral that mimicked a batter’s swing. Yesler Field was full of baseball art—even the terrazzo floor where we stood was inlaid with an enormous compass rose, the Navigator logo—and it was a perfect venue for a festive baseball wedding.

  If only this imperfect and temperamental bride would cooperate. I gazed up at the bats and down at the compass, reining in my own temper, and tried one last time.

  “If there’s an issue with the dress that I should know about—”

  “There’s no issue,” she snarled. “Just that my friends say it’s totally lame.”

  “Oh. I thought it sounded lovely.”

  “Like anyone cares what you think, you’re just some flunky. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  With that she went pounding away from me across the gallery and down the main staircase. I followed with a sigh across the compass rose, then down the stairs. But I breathed a sigh of relief when we emerged into the chill of the October evening and spotted her father and the taxi.

  Yesler Field is just south of Pioneer Square, the historic precinct of downtown that’s now packed with shops and nightclubs, and even on a weeknight with no ballgame there was plenty of traffic going by. As Rose’s cab rolled away up First Avenue, Walter began to speak to me, but his voice was too soft to make out above the noise.

  I gestured us back to the entrance and unlocked one of the swinging doors with my passkey. Once inside I should have checked to make sure it locked again behind us, but Walter was already on his way up the stairs.

  “What were you saying?” I asked as I caught up to him.

  “I just hope Digger doesn’t write about this,” he muttered.

  “Do you really think he would? It’s got nothing to do with baseball.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But that wouldn’t stop him.”

  Although I rarely read Duvall’s online column, I made a mental note to look for it this week. Beau welcomed publicity for his brides, but not that kind.

  “I don’t think you need to worry,” I said. “Remember, Digger’s got the World Series to write about for the next week. He’ll forget all about this.”

  “He’d better,” said Walter McKinney. His gentle features twisted into something remarkably like hatred. “He had just b-better.”

  Chapter Four

  Back upstairs in the owners’ suite, the clamor of voices and laughter was louder than ever. This crowd was so focused on baseball that the bride’s departure hadn’t dampened the party all that much. Some of the Fiends—that was her band, Honeysuckle Hell and the Fiends—had left without even checking on the condition of their lead singer. But the rest of the guests were still eating beef, drinking bourbon, and lionizing Charmin’ Harmon.

  Batting practice was over. Rob Harmon, now wearing a Navigators warm-up jacket, was standing at the circular bar that dominated the suite with a knot of foxy women and cigar-puffing men hanging on his every word. Several reporters were taking notes, and a few even had tiny tape recorders going.

  But I didn’t see Aaron anywhere, so I kept scanning the room. Over in a corner Digger Duvall was deep in conversation with one of the two young men who had chased Rose on the diamond. Must have parked the blonde somewhere else, I thought.

  The young man, despite his macho leather getup, had a soft weak-looking face underlined by a pathetic little wisp of beard. He was speaking quickly and earnestly, but when Digger suddenly burst into scornful laughter he stopped, his mouth quivering like a scolded child’s.

  “Yo, JD!” said someone behind me. “Let’s blow.”

  It was Rose’s second pursuer, who looked anything but childlike—his head was entirely shaved except for a long hank of hair combed forward to a point between his eyebrows. As I watched, he push
ed through the crowd to Digger’s corner and disengaged his comrade.

  Wispy JD seemed to argue with him about leaving, but then Leroy Theroux stepped in to claim Digger’s attention, and both the young men left. Theroux didn’t sit down but leaned his gnarled black fists on Duvall’s table and glowered as he spoke. The sportswriter glowered back, and I wondered what the problem was. So long as it’s not about the wedding.

  Then my observations were interrupted by an imperious tap on the shoulder and Beau Paliere’s voice.

  “She is gone, la pute? You got rid of her?”

  “She’s the bride, Beau, or hadn’t you noticed? At least call her by her name.” I wasn’t sure what pute meant, but it sounded nasty. “Rose is on her way home, but I’m going to talk to her in the morning and see if I can find out what’s going on. She seems awfully unhappy.”

  “She is unhappy? Monsieur Theroux is unhappy! And he is—”

  “The client, I know, I know. Listen, I haven’t eaten since this morning, so I’m taking a break, all right?”

  Beau’s expression darkened. First an exhibitionist bride, now an assistant who dared to require nourishment.

  “Very well, a brief break.”

  “I’ll just swallow, I won’t chew.”

  He sniffed and turned away, and I went in search of food or Aaron or preferably both. But I didn’t get three steps before Digger Duvall, flushed with drink, confronted me again.

  “And how is the blushing bride? Blushing a little extra tonight?” Digger had his reporter’s notebook, much like Aaron’s, in one hand, and the other hand slid around my waist as he put his cheek near mine. His breath was foul. “How about a quote, Red? Did she show off her tits on purpose? All the world’s a stage for some people.”

  “And a sewer for some others.” I’m just not myself when I’ve skipped a meal. Or maybe I’m more myself. I glared at him. “Sure, here’s your quote. ‘If you don’t take your hand off me, I’m going to cram that cigar up your…nose.’”