Bride and Doom Page 5

  “Miss McKinney, of course! I’ve got your gown all ready in the main dressing room. Just gorgeous. Come on back.” As she ushered Rose along, Hazel sent me a quizzical look over her shoulder. “You working for my boy Beau now?”

  “Only temporarily.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Wondering just how she meant that, I followed her into the gilt and shell-pink salon. It had a round dais in the center and a changing room with a louvered door to one side, and the walls were draped with gauzy curtains. Scattered here and there, more delicate little tables displayed veils and garters and other bridal trimmings. Girl Central.

  I took a seat on a plumply brocaded pink and gold settee and looked around me with a happy sigh. I couldn’t help picturing myself in this same setting, with Lily and my mother watching from this same seat as I modeled gown after spectacular gown. Not that I could afford anything in Hazel’s inventory, but a girl can dream.

  Rose, meanwhile, startled Hazel by marching into the changing room where her own gown hung and yanking the door decisively shut behind her.

  “You let me know if you need help!” Hazel called through the door, and then turned to me with an inquisitive look.

  “She’s kind of bashful,” I confided. “You know how it is.”

  Hazel sniffed, unimpressed. “Takes all kinds.”

  As the minutes passed, I wandered to a display table. Could I carry off a tiara? I set a sparkly one on my hair and surveyed the effect in a gilt-framed mirror. Not bad…

  “Getting married yourself?” Hazel asked, with just a touch of sarcasm.

  “Actually, I am.”

  “Really?” I could see her shifting mental gears now that I was a potential customer. “What style of wedding?”

  “I’m not really sure yet.”

  She sniffed again. “Better make it a show-stopper. It’ll be one big advertisement for your services, you know. If you screw up, who’s going to trust you with their own event?”

  I was groping for a reply when the changing room door opened a crack.

  “Uh, excuse me?” came Rose’s voice. “There’s these weird buttons…”

  Hazel beat me to the door by a step and vanished inside. More minutes went by, while I fingered the filigreed lace of a garter and considered a glittering Cinderella slipper with a stacked heel. Will people really judge Made in Heaven by my wedding? No pressure, Carnegie. I put the slipper down.

  “Ta da!” Hazel announced as she swung the door wide. “Didn’t I tell you? Gorgeous. A vision. Up here on the platform, dear.”

  The gown was gorgeous all right, a soft creamy silk-satin with silk-chiffon illusion sleeves and a fluted chapel-length skirt. The scoop neckline showed off Rose’s pale, clear skin to perfection. Clear and unmarked…

  Ah-hah. Something clicked. The anomaly I’d registered last night about Honeysuckle Hell, goddess of Goth, was that she had no tattoos. Also no piercings and no studs. Even the long green fingernails must have been press-on, because her nails were short and unpainted today.

  That confirmed my growing sense that the Goth persona was simply a facade, taken on when Honeysuckle Hell picked up her guitar. If it weren’t for the dark purple hair, which looked close to black anyway in this soft light, Rose McKinney might have been any blushing bride.

  She really was blushing too, though not with demure delight. More like fidgety self-consciousness. Rose stood on the dais like a sacrificial victim, keeping her back to the three-way mirror and staring glumly at the floor.

  “Sheila doesn’t like it,” she muttered.

  “And who is this Sheila?” asked Hazel, affronted.

  Rose shrugged. “Sort of my maid of honor, I guess. She’s in the band, you know? She said she’d be in the ceremony with me, but she doesn’t like the dresses. She says they’re lame.”

  “Lame?” Hazel echoed in disbelief. “Listen to me, young lady—”

  “Is there a veil?” I cut in. “We need to see the full effect.”

  There was a veil, a waterfall of silk tulle. It had the weight of an embroidered hem to help it hang properly, but the fabric itself was so sheer that it enveloped the girl like a softening but transparent mist. I settled the headband securely on her hair and fluffed out the tulle into symmetrical waves. Then I took Rose gently by the shoulders and turned her toward the mirror. By the look in her widening eyes, my hunch was right.

  “I guess it is kind of pretty,” she said shyly. “My dad saw it in a magazine and said he liked it.”

  “Your dad has a good eye,” I said. Then I leaned in to murmur, “And if you ask me, your friend Sheila is full of shit.”

  That got another smile, a big one, and I winked at Hazel.

  “Now, let’s get fitting,” I went on. “Hazel, do you think the hem is just a touch long in back? We don’t want her heel catching…”

  We were almost finished with the tucking and pinning, and had backed away from Rose to survey our handiwork, when Hazel’s assistant Amber returned from her lunch break. Amber was a big breathless girl who towered over her boss, though right now she hunched her shoulders timidly as she edged into the salon.

  I’d always wondered why Hazel employed someone as déclassé as Amber, but after Hazel’s crack about my screwing up, I quit wondering. Will there really be that kind of scrutiny of my wedding? I asked myself. How am I supposed to enjoy it if it’s one big test? Eloping wouldn’t be so bad…

  “Sorry to be late again, Mrs. C.,” Amber was saying. “There was such a line at the deli. Oh, that dress is super!”

  She took in the gown first, then the wearer. “Oh, it’s Rose! Wow, I just heard on the radio what happened at your party. That was your party at the stadium, wasn’t it? You’re the one marrying the baseball player? Gosh, I would have just freaked out, seeing a dead body like that. Did you just freak out when you saw it, or did you even see it? I can’t stand that kind of thing, I would have just…are you all right?”

  Rose was pale to begin with, but now she went paler than her gown, and the veil quivered with her trembling.

  “What happened?” she said woodenly. “What body?”

  “That sportswriter guy, Digger something?” Amber was looking doubtfully at my furious scowl. “Somebody took him out with a baseball bat. It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, him being a sportswriter and somebody using a baseball bat to—”

  She broke off and took a startled step backward, just as Hazel and I darted toward the dais. But we were too late. Rose crumpled to the floor in a dead faint, encircled by a snowdrift of satin and tulle.

  Chapter Eight

  “Feeling better?”

  Rose swallowed another mouthful of her Wholey Grail whole grain special.

  “Much.”

  I’d thought at first that the news of Digger Duvall’s murder had caused her to faint, but she had insisted that it was nothing more than hunger and a hangover. As her plate emptied and her color returned, I began to believe her. Hearing about a corpse at a party is shocking, naturally, but not that shocking.

  We were seated at a sunny window table in By Bread Alone—BBA to those in the know—a counterculture bakery and café that served fabulous sandwiches. But that wasn’t why I chose it for our late lunch. BBA was home base for Juice Nugent, wedding cake baker extraordinaire, who still waited tables here when she wasn’t working her magic with almond fondant or hazelnut ganache back in the kitchen.

  She was just coming off a shift now, and she laid a clipboard on our table with a gusty sigh.

  “Friggin’ tourists, they go all year now. I been run off my feet. How ya doing, Kincaid?”

  “Doing good, Juice.”

  Juice Nugent was short and busty, like a pigeon with an attitude, and her spiky hair was sometimes chartreuse, sometimes magenta, and sometimes, like today, a blinding shade of crossing-guard-vest orange. Her standard short-shorts were hidden by a BBA apron, but as usual she wore high-heeled cowboy boots from her sizable private collection.

  Today’s pair was
appliquéd with pink leather roses, a sweetly feminine touch for someone sporting a button that read QUEER AND PROUD, ANY QUESTIONS? Between the baker’s boots and the bride’s dog collar, I felt like somebody’s maidenly great-aunt as I introduced the two of them.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Rose. “Those boots are totally cho.”

  “Thanks, um, Honeysuckle.” Juice was gazing at Rose with shy admiration, an expression I’d never seen or even imagined on her. “Or do you use Rose off stage? That’s your real name, right? I looked it up.”

  “Rose is fine,” said the bride, surveying her empty plate with satisfaction.

  “Cool. Um, congratulations on getting married and everything.” Fascinated by this change in demeanor, I watched Juice groping for a conversational gambit. “Where you going on your honeymoon?”

  “Santo Domingo.” Rose smiled at the thought. “So I can see where Gordo grew up and meet all the rest of his family that isn’t coming to the wedding.”

  “Cool.” Juice hesitated again, then took the plunge. “I’m, like, a major fan of yours, Rose. I heard you at NocNoc when the Fiends were just taking off, and I’ve downloaded everything from your Web site.”

  “That’s great. You know, I could comp you some tickets for our next show if you want.”

  “Hell, yeah! Thanks. You need anything else? We got wicked good tomato polenta soup today.”

  Rose shook her head, so Juice doffed the apron and took a seat. Her black tank top revealed a winged dragon taking tattooed flight from her cleavage.

  I nodded at it. “That’s new.”

  “Yeah,” she said, preoccupied with the clipboard. “I always wanted one, only Rita didn’t like ’em. When we broke up, the first thing I did was head to Black Cat Tat and get myself inked. So, here’s the home run cake that the suits asked for.”

  She laid a colored drawing before us, of an enormous spherical cheesecake decorated to look like a baseball. The “suits” were the Navigator management, and this was just the kind of photo-op cake they’d had in mind. “Stitched” with red licorice and scribbled with chocolate icing autographs, it was cleverly dusted here and there with cocoa powder to simulate the smudges on a ball that’s been smacked into the bleachers.

  Very clever, and very much about Gordo, not Gordo-and-Rose. Juice obviously had the same thought, because she overlaid the page with another drawing: a big chocolate guitar with a heart-shaped sound hole and pulled-sugar strings. Rose looked at it thoughtfully but didn’t speak, so I jumped in.

  “That’s fabulous, Juice! I love it. How many would it serve?”

  “Only two hundred,” she said, flushing with pleasure at the praise, “but anything we do will need cupcakes to go with, ’cause this deal is open to the fans, right?”

  “Right, but we won’t need a whole lot because of the chocolate fountain. It’s going right in the center of the rotunda, and—”

  “Chocolate fountain?” Juice pulled a face. “Kinda corny, isn’t—?”

  “Gordo’s a huge chocoholic,” I added, with a quick kick at her shins, “so he’s really excited about it.”

  “Well, who wouldn’t be?” said Juice dutifully. “Anyway, the baseball cupcakes are supposed to be frosted white with red stitching, but I thought for the guitar cake we could do white with marzipan musical notes. Whaddya think, um, Rose?”

  “It’s great, only…” Rose hesitated, choosing her words with care. She hadn’t seemed to notice the crack about the fountain—or maybe, judging by her next words, she didn’t care. “You see, this whole wedding is for Gordo, really. It’s a big celebration for the team and for his home run record.”

  “But you’re the bride. You should get what you want. Right, Kincaid?”

  I opened my mouth to agree, but Rose preempted me.

  “I know,” she said. “But all I really want is Gordo.”

  Who could argue with that?

  “And now that I like my dress,” she went on, “I’m cool with everything else. I mean, it’s just one day out of my whole life. It’s not the wedding that’s important, it’s the marriage. Right?”

  She said this with a sly little smile at me, and I laughed aloud. If only more of my brides felt this way. Of course then I’d be out of a job…

  Juice shrugged, and the dragon flapped its wings. “OK then, we go with the baseball. I got the estimates here, Kincaid, but I dunno if Rose needs to bother with ’em.”

  “I’ve got things to do,” said Rose. “See you, Juice. ’Bye, Carnegie.”

  She began to walk away, then hurried back and touched me on the shoulder.

  “Thanks for today. Thanks a lot.”

  “My pleasure,” I told her. And somehow it really was.

  Juice watched her idol leave the café and disappear into the stream of pedestrians outside.

  “Did you hear that? She liked my boots, and she’s comping me tickets! You’d think she’d be a freakin’ drama queen or something. But she’s so down to earth, like a regular person.”

  “She is a regular person,” I said, amused.

  “Not. Have you ever heard her sing? She’s phenomenal.” Juice passed me the cost sheet for the cake and cupcakes. “I just hope that Duvall bozo getting offed didn’t upset her too much.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “Yeah, on the radio in the kitchen. Did you see it happen?”

  “I saw the corpse.”

  She scowled. “Serves him right, the fascist.”

  “Juice!”

  “OK, OK, maybe not getting killed. But you should see what he said about Honeysuckle, I mean Rose, back when they announced the engagement. He’s all gaga about this Gutierrez guy, Gordo is da man, blah blah blah, and then he calls Rose a baseball groupie. A freakin’ genius like her, a groupie! Dude said she was ‘a bar singer of little talent and less class.’ How’s that for suck?”

  “I didn’t know about that.” I frowned, remembering the look on Walter McKinney’s face last night. No wonder he hated Digger. And what about Gordo—how would he take someone insulting his fiancée?

  I grew increasingly preoccupied with these thoughts as we finished our business with the cake, and as I walked back up Seneca to Vanna White, my white van. I was sure that Boris hadn’t killed Digger, but there remained the question of who actually did. Gentle, amiable Gordo Gutierrez? Or the mild and stammering Walter McKinney? Surely not. And yet they both cherished Rose…

  My steps had slowed to the point where someone bumped into me, so I moved aside into the recessed space between a couple of angled shop windows. The shop was a jeweler’s, and I found myself staring into a window full of diamonds—which distracted me from Walter in a big way.

  I wasn’t getting a diamond. Once I’d accepted Aaron’s spur-of-the-moment proposal, and we had both calmed down enough to speak in entire sentences, he’d raised the question of an engagement ring.

  “Is the diamond thing a big deal to you, Stretch? Because I was thinking we could use the money to start saving for a down payment on a house.”

  A house. A home of my own, with Aaron. The prospect had been so unexpected, and so sweet, that I’d rushed to say no, the diamond thing wasn’t a big deal at all. Only now, looking into this dazzling window, I wondered if I’d spoken too soon.

  The slender pointed oval of that marquise stone, for instance, would look so elegant on my hand. Or the cushion-cut diamond that seemed to float in its rose-gold tension setting like a tiny work of art. Oh, or that baguette diamond with the pink sapphire side-stones on the engraved platinum band.

  I’d never even liked pink sapphires, but I pulled out my cell phone to take a picture of the ring display. Just for fun, I told myself. Just to show Lily later on. Then somehow my feet went wandering right through the door of the shop. A wisp of a white-haired lady drifted delicately over to ask if she might assist me.

  “I just wondered,” I said, pointing, “about the price of that ring?”

  “Oh, yes,” she cooed. “One of my very favorit
es.”

  Then she named a sum that sent me retreating back to the sidewalk. Holy moley. Never mind saving for a down payment, that was a down payment, and maybe a couple months’ mortgage checks to boot. I’d have to tell Aaron about it tonight…

  The thought of tonight slowed me down all over again. Should I give in and offer to watch the game with him, or stand my ground? No question what Lily would say, I thought as I climbed into Vanna and pulled into traffic.

  But I wasn’t Lily, and Aaron had been so damn cold last night. At least while we were out on the concourse. Once the police showed up at the party, he’d tried to stay by my side, but Starkey had hustled me into an office and kept me there with his endless questions. And when I finally emerged, Aaron was gone. So shouldn’t he be the one offering me an olive branch? He practically owed me the whole tree.

  I vacillated about it all the way through my grocery shopping, then back to my houseboat, without reaching a decision. Then as I came along the dock, I was sidetracked yet again, this time by the sight of an elderly gentleman waiting at my front door.

  The gentleman wore an impeccably tailored black overcoat and an equally impeccable black fedora atop his silver hair. As I approached him, he swept off the hat with a courtly little bow and handed me a business card.

  “Miss Kincaid?” he inquired in a rasping but somehow agreeable voice. “Trofim Denisovich, attorney at law, representing Mr. Boris Nevsky.”

  “Oh, thank goodness.” I grasped the card gratefully. How could I even think about jewelry at a time like this? “I’m so glad to meet you, Mr. Denisovich.”

  “Trofim.”

  “Trofim, then. Please come in.” I led the way into the kitchen and set my grocery bags on the table. “How’s Boris holding up? If there’s anything at all I can do to prove his innocence, just tell me.”

  “Innocence,” said the lawyer thoughtfully, as if the word intrigued him. He had just the faintest trace of an accent, but his English was fluent and precise. “You believe young Boris is innocent?”