May the Best Man Die Read online

  “It's right down there, past the elevators—oh, good morning!”

  As I opened the office door for Ivy, I nearly collided with Eddie Breen, my not-very-silent partner. His slight frame was swathed in an ancient but dignified black topcoat, his jug ears glowed rosily against his sparse white hair, and his teeth were clenched on the inevitable unlit cigar.

  “Morning, Carnegie. Jesus H. Christ, it's colder than Christian forgiveness out there.” Then he spotted Ivy, and the steel-gray eyes brightened. “Ms. Tyler! Pleasure to see you.”

  Eddie was normally gruff with our clients, believing as he did that enthusiasm for matrimony was possible evidence of an unsound mind. His own interest was all in numbers: taxes, timetables, discounts with vendors, and response rates from direct-mail advertising. We made a perfect team: the young front woman and the veteran back room guy. I even let him boss me around a bit—as long as he doesn't smoke in the office.

  But Eddie had been mellowing lately, to the point of actually smiling at certain clients. Most mothers of the bride bored him to tears, but not Ivy Tyler. Eddie wouldn't set foot in an MFC—he was a Nescafé man, and proud of it—but he admired business savvy wherever he saw it.

  Apparently that wasn't all Eddie admired. He stepped aside for Ivy to pass, returning her friendly nod, and as she disappeared around the hallway corner, he shook his head and said, “Now that's a fine-looking woman.”

  “Eddie, you rogue!”

  Unseen by either of us, Joe Solveto had emerged from his office. Joe was quite the character: fiendishly shrewd about his business, theatrically debonair about his wardrobe, and wickedly willing to play up his sexual orientation just enough to make Eddie uncomfortable.

  “Better keep this man away from the brides, Carnegie. You know how girls love a sailor. Of course, so do I.”

  Eddie's cigar swiveled irritably. “That's enough of that. Where's the file box I sent over?”

  “Fourth floor storeroom.” Joe ran a hand through his stylishly mussed fair hair. “Shall I come help you find it?”

  My partner refused, of course, and stomped off to the elevator, still in his coat. Joe laughed and turned to me.

  “And how was Beautiful Beau?”

  I was starting to tell him when my cell phone sounded. Thinking it might be Mike, I gestured an apology at Joe and took the call.

  “Carrie, how was your television show? I'm sure you were wonderful!” Mom is the only person who calls me Carrie, and surely the only one capable of such a dubious opinion.

  I mouthed the words “my mother” at Joe, who grinned and signaled that he'd be in his office when Ivy returned.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Was Beau Paliere just as handsome in person? Did you talk to him after the show?”

  “Not really—”

  “Because it seems to me that you two would have a lot in common. A lot of shared interests. How long will he be in Seattle?”

  “I have no idea, Mom. This isn't a good time—”

  But she had rushed to another topic, sounding rather embarrassed—not a typical state for my mother.

  “Carrie, about Christmas. I've been meaning to tell you, but I didn't know how to say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Well, dear, I'm thinking of doing Christmas differently this year. Would you mind terribly if I went on a little trip instead of having you come home? Timmy can't make it anyway, you know . . .”

  This was disappointing—even without my brother's company, a few days of visiting with my mother and seeing old friends would have provided some much-needed Christmas cheer. But I didn't mind terribly, and wouldn't have said so if I had.

  “That's fine, Mom. I want you to suit yourself, you should know that. Where are you going?”

  “The Oregon coast. Just a trip with friends, you know, to a little cottage in Cannon Beach. I miss the ocean.” Mom had lived in harbor cities for much of her life, and only moved inland to Idaho when a teaching job took her there. “Are you sure it's all right?”

  “Of course! In fact, this will work better. I'll spend Christmas with Lily and the boys, and I'll get over to Boise later this winter, when I'm not quite so busy. I could take some extra days at Sun Valley, I hear they do fabulous weddings at the lodge there. But I've got to go now, Mom, I've got a client. Love you, bye!”

  All through the menu meeting with Joe and Ivy, my attention was split between assessing various foodstuffs and pondering various questions, like how much Made in Heaven would suffer from my appalling TV debut, and how long it would be before Darwin James would turn up. And how bad Aaron's hangover would be; served him right.

  I also recalled Lily's remark that Jason Kraye had teased her brother about not drinking. Perhaps Darwin hadn't fallen off the wagon; perhaps he'd been pushed. Damn that Jason, anyway.

  “Carnegie?”

  “Hmm?”

  Ivy sounded peeved. “I said, do you think we've ordered enough foie gras and figs?”

  “Sure,” I said, covering. Sally must have gotten her genes from somewhere, after all. “Joe's a past master at calculating these things.”

  “Fine, then, we're done.” As we rose, she said pointedly, “You'll let me know how tomorrow goes?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Once she had left, a thought struck me. “Joe, what do you know about Ivy's husband?”

  “The notorious Charles?”

  “Notorious for what?”

  “My dear, you are such a philistine.” Joe perched on his desk and crossed one exquisitely tailored leg over the other. “No wonder you get along so well with Eddie. Does he take you to monster-truck rallies?”

  “If you're not going to tell me—”

  “All right, just to save you from embarrassing yourself with our client. Charles Tyler was a conductor, not a celebrity exactly, but fairly well-known.”

  “I knew that.”

  “Did you know he was a composer, too? Modern stuff, the kind that the harder it is to listen to, the better it's supposed to be.”

  I nodded. “OK, I'm remembering now. British, but he lived here?”

  “Exactly. And he still lives here.”

  Joe himself was an aficionado of early music—recorders and lutes and such. But even as he rejected modern music, he devoured musical gossip. He went on to inform me that everyone in the know was amazed when Tyler, instead of snapping up some soprano, fell for a Seattle cocktail waitress named Ivy, with a little kid in tow. He even bought her a coffee shop to keep her occupied while he toured.

  “He was sort of a nineteenth-century gentleman, you know? Edgy modern music, but no taste for technology, and a kind of noblesse oblige about lifting Ivy up from the working people. But things went wrong.”

  Some years after the unexpected marriage, Tyler had suffered a nervous breakdown, and soon after that it came to light that his agent had embezzled most of his money. The great conductor declared bankruptcy and went into seclusion, and his blue-collar wife gradually emerged as a captain of industry.

  “The rumor is that Tyler has a degenerative disease,” said Joe. “Nerves or brain or something. It's the kind of thing they don't delve into when they profile Ivy in the women's magazines. She protects his privacy at all costs.”

  I wondered how deep Aaron was going to delve, in the book he was writing. But then I wondered a lot of things about Aaron—like whether I was being too hard-nosed about him—and I was determined to stop. I thanked Joe and returned to my office.

  I meant to put in a full day, what with the arrangements for Tyler/Sanjek and the last-minute details of Buckmeister/Frost, the extremely Christmassy wedding I had coming up on the twenty-third—“Christmas Eve Eve,” as Bonnie Buckmeister called it.

  But by lunchtime I was yawning, and yearning to burrow deep under Lily's quilts and stay there. Mike still hadn't called me though, which meant that Darwin was still missing. Would I be intruding if I came home early, or would Lily have gone to work after all, just to get away from the silent tele
phone? If only I had the houseboat back—

  Then Kelli appeared at my desk, owl-eyed, and banished all thoughts of sleep.

  “There's a policeman asking for you!” she whispered, pleased with this melodramatic break in the routine. Kelli dotted the “i” in her name with a little heart. “But he's not wearing a uniform. He called you Car-nay-gie. That's not right, is it? I didn't think that was right. Oops, here he comes.”

  Chapter Seven

  DETECTIVE BATES WAS A LARGE, FLORID MAN WITH DULL BLACK hair and a wheezing voice.

  “I went to your office,” he said with a slight air of grievance, “and your neighbor told me you were working at this address.”

  I nodded uneasily. “What can I do for you? Is there something wrong?”

  He heaved a large, wheezy sigh, sounding even more tired than I felt. “Ms. Kincaid, a man's body was retrieved from the Ship Canal this morning. His wallet was gone, and we need to ID him as soon as possible.”

  “But why are you telling me?” My own voice sounded faint and faraway.

  Bates was watching me closely. Not until later did I realize that he had come in person, instead of telephoning, just so he could observe my expression as I heard the next words.

  “Your business card was found in his pants pocket. Would you be willing to take a look at the body?”

  Not Aaron. I don't know how my expression looked to Bates, but that was all I could think of, at least at first. Surely not Aaron. He wasn't drunk enough to fall in the canal. And then, remembering Lily's tearful face, Oh, my God, not Darwin . . .

  Things got a bit hazy after that. My throat closed up and my brain went on automatic pilot, and I didn't even ask whether the drowned man was black or white. I didn't ask anything at all.

  Detective Bates talked some more, then he drove me somewhere downtown, and then I was standing in a bright, chilly room, looking through a parted curtain. Behind the curtain was a sheet of glass through which I saw a woman in blue hospital scrubs. She reached down with gloved hands to the draped figure lying before her, and pulled back the cloth to reveal a face.

  But not the face I feared to see. The dead man wasn't Aaron, or Lily's brother, either. The pale features, puffy and slack from soaking all night in the cold, dark water, belonged to Jason Kraye. I made the official identification statement, the curtain closed, and I turned away.

  It took a moment to find my voice. “He must have fallen in after the party. I guess he couldn't swim. Or maybe he was too drunk to.”

  “Or maybe he was dead before he hit the water.”

  “What!”

  “I never said he drowned.” Once again, Bates was watching me intently. “Someone slashed him across the upper left thigh and severed the femoral artery. This man bled to death.”

  There was a plastic chair near the door of the horrible room, and I dropped into it, hugging my arms to myself as if to reaffirm the reality of my own warm flesh. Alarmed, Bates softened his manner.

  “Can I get you some water? No? Just take deep breaths.” He waited a moment, then got back to business. “Ms. Kincaid, I need to ask you some questions about your whereabouts last night. Could you come with me, please?”

  Two hours later—two long, repetitive hours—I was back at Joe's with a grinding headache and the mother of all guilty consciences. Not about Jason Kraye's murder, of course. By the time I explained my movements, and provided phone numbers for Frank Sanjek and Lily James and Aaron Gold so they could back me up, Detective Bates seemed satisfied that I was a witness, not a suspect.

  At least I think he was.

  In any case, with the victim identified and a team dispatched to search the Hot Spot Café, the detective proceeded to grill me about the bachelor party, down to the tiniest detail: who was there, what they said, how they behaved. And, like the dutiful citizen I am, I obliged.

  But. Bates didn't ask me whether I'd seen Jason Kraye after the party—through binoculars, say—and somehow I hadn't volunteered that information. Why not? Surely what I'd witnessed from the storeroom of Solveto's Catering last night was just drunken horseplay between the best man and Lily's brother. Just high spirits and retsina. Surely Darwin had nothing to do with Kraye's death.

  But if I really believed that, why wasn't I speaking up? I sat, pondering this question, while Eddie and Joe left me tactfully alone, and Kelli peeked in at me from time to time, all aquiver with curiosity.

  I pondered something else, as well. If I was really, completely over Aaron Gold, why had I immediately feared for his safety when Bates told me that a man had drowned? Why was the thought of Aaron's death such an utter nightmare?

  Then a phone call summoned me back into my workday.

  “Hey, Kincaid, you standing me up or what? I already ordered my gumbo, and once I eat it, I'm going home to crash. I been up since three.”

  “Oh, Juice, I'm sorry! I completely forgot.”

  “That's not like you, Kincaid. But no prob.” Juice Nugent was a green-haired, tongue-studded, supernaturally talented young baker. She had once lived on the streets, but now she worked a day job at a bakery downtown and did wedding cakes—her true love—on the side. “So, you want to reschedule?”

  With baker's hours, mid-afternoon is dinnertime; our final meeting on Buckmeister/Frost was supposed to be at the Blue Bayou, a Cajun restaurant near Juice's apartment in Ballard. I could hear her slurping a spoonful of gumbo, and suddenly I could smell it, too. The Bayou served up divinely incendiary food all day long, eat in or take out. If angels could eat, they'd get takeout from the Bayou.

  Viewing a corpse should have quashed my appetite, I know, but I hadn't had a thing since breakfast, and not much then. And I really love gumbo. And I really hate feeling guilty.

  “I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Then I'm going home myself. It's been a long day.”

  The Bayou's dim little foyer was crowded with regulars, all waiting for their cartons of crab cakes and dirty rice, but the table area was half-empty. Not that Juice is hard to spot anyway, between her chartreuse buzz cut and her Gay Pride buttons. She sat in a booth bedecked with Mardi Gras posters, chowing down and drinking Anchor Steam out of the bottle.

  In rare deference to the weather, black leather pants had replaced Juice's customary short shorts, but her customary cowboy boots were very much in evidence. They were alligator today, in a shade of pink that no gator has ever aspired to. Still, the Buckmeister family had bonded with Juice over cowboy boots, so who was I to quibble? I ordered, and we hunkered down to talk serious Christmas cake.

  Bonnie Buckmeister and her parents, Buck and Betty—Eddie called them the Killer B's—were thorough-going Yuletide nuts. The groom, Brian Frost, was still out of the country on business; Bonnie had assured me that her Brian adored Christmas just as much as she did.

  So Buckmeister/Frost was going to out-Christmas Dickens: a full choir caroling at St. Mark's Cathedral, bridesmaids in holly-green gowns with glowing bouquets of red amaryllis, and a wedding feast served up in the beautiful old domed ballroom of the aptly named Arctic Building on Third Avenue. Joe Solveto had dreamed up a hot chocolate bar, with colorful mugs and candy-cane stir sticks and generous shots of Kahlua. The party favors would be snow globes with Santa Claus inside, and instead of numbering the guest tables, I was naming them after reindeer.

  As the bachelor said to the stripper, Merry freakin' Christmas.

  But the cake—or rather cakes—would be the showstopper. Juice, an absolute wizard with blown sugar, was creating a series of gift-shaped confections, one minicake per table, each one unique and each exquisitely adorned with sweet, glistening ribbons and edible tree ornaments. The bride and groom would cut into a special, larger cake, with a fudge-frosted Yule log on top to freeze for their first anniversary. All we needed to settle now was the total number of cakes and the delivery arrangements.

  This was the kind of work I loved: being creative and yet efficient, enjoying the enthusiasm of other entrepreneurs, getting paid, in effect, to throw a f
abulous party. But this afternoon I was depressed and inattentive, and my efforts to hide the fact were futile.

  “What's with you today, Kincaid?” Juice finished her beer and belched in contentment.

  “Oh, it's nothing. Actually, it's not nothing . . .”

  I floundered to a halt. If I wasn't asking Eddie's or Joe's opinion on this—or, heaven forbid, my mother's—then why ask a former runaway with a punctured tongue? Because that's the only way to get the answer you want to hear, said my conscience. I told it to shut up.

  “You see, Juice, there's this decision I made . . .”

  Chapter Eight

  MY CONSCIENCE IS NO FOOL, EVEN IF I SOMETIMES AM. ONCE I explained my dilemma, carefully substituting “a friend of a friend” for Darwin's name, and “possibly involved in something illegal” for Jason's murder, Juice came down hard on the side of silence, just like I needed her to.

  “Man, don't ever finger somebody you care about, not even for jaywalking! I mean, don't out-and-out lie to the cops, 'cause they'll nail you, but if they don't ask all the questions, you don't have to give 'em all the answers. And if this friend's friend is innocent like you think, you'll land him in a world of hurt for nothing. Life's enough trouble without making more. You did the right thing.”

  “That's what I thought,” I said, taking heart. “It was only by accident that I saw . . . what I saw, and I'm sure it was completely unrelated to . . . to what happened later. Listen, I'm not quite finished here, so if you want to take off, go ahead. And thanks a lot.”

  Juice slapped me on the shoulder and left, the fishing lures and other trinkets sewn to her motorcycle jacket jingling as she went. I sat brooding, crumbling a sourdough roll and watching the fragments drift into the remains of my gumbo. If I'd done the right thing, why did I feel so wrong?

  “Carnegie?” said a man's voice, and I could tell by the tone it wasn't the first time he had said it. “Carnegie, are you OK?”

  “Mike! What are you doing here?” An inane question—detectives have to eat, too—but his sudden appearance in Juice's seat had startled me unduly. I really, really needed to be asleep. “Is Lily with you?”