Bride and Doom

by Deborah Donnelly

  Even better, the wall looked long enough. We had to accommodate not just the fountain itself but also the attendant who would keep it flowing, the table of goodies to dip into it, and the hordes of guests who always converge when there’s chocolate in the air. I took measurements just to make sure—I carry a little tape measure for just these occasions—and jotted down some figures along with a note about Rose’s apricots.

  Then my pencil jumped and slithered as I was startled by the sound of footsteps in the gallery above my head.

  “Hello?” I peered up, past the darkened chandelier of bats, but saw nothing. “Who’s there?”

  The footsteps halted. A moment of breathless silence, then a rapid clatter as someone strode rapidly along the gallery and through the double doors at the far end, heading toward the owners’ suite.

  I shouldn’t have followed, of course. I should have left the building and called stadium security from the safety of the Batter’s Box. I should have minded my own business.

  As Eddie would say, Fat chance.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I am not entirely dim. As I took the stairs to the gallery two at a time, I speed-dialed stadium security.

  “This is Carnegie Kincaid,” I gasped out. “Is that Eugene?”

  “Nope, George. You’re the one works for Monsoor Paliere, right?”

  “Right,” I said, and grimaced. Eugene was the smart one. “Listen, I need you. I was in the rotunda—”

  “Okey-doke, I’ll head over there.”

  “No, wait, I’m up in the gallery now, but I’m taking the main corridor toward the owners’ suite. I heard someone running—”

  “Who was it?”

  “That’s just it,” I said through gritted teeth. And they give these people guns. “I don’t know who it was, but they didn’t answer when I called, so it seemed suspicious. Can you meet me there?”

  “Uh, where?”

  “The owners’ suite. Hurry, would you? It might be someone who belongs here, but it might not.”

  “Well, all right.” He sounded doubtful. “I’m way over here by the Third Avenue exit, so it’ll take me a while to—”

  “Just hurry.”

  I snapped off my phone and shoved it in my pocket as I pushed through the double doors and rushed along the corridor, my shoulder bag flapping wildly against my side. But now I could hear no one’s footsteps but my own, and when I reached the owners’ suite, the door was closed. I eased it open a crack to listen but heard nothing at all, so I stepped inside. My breathing—and my thinking—slowed to normal as I looked around the suite, which was unoccupied and undisturbed.

  Party spaces, when they’re empty, always remind me of stage sets after the play has ended and the audience gone home. There were no safety lights in here, just a twilight dimness spreading softly through the windows. Chairs were neatly upended on their tables, and bar glasses gleamed in orderly ranks on their shelves. The buffets, which I’d last seen cloaked in linen and graced with flowers, were stripped bare and pushed back against the walls.

  All very normal, and what else had I expected? The person I’d heard was probably a janitor, or one of the office staff working late. It was curious that they hadn’t answered me, but then people do curious things. I left the suite shaking my head at myself and preparing to apologize to George.

  But George hadn’t arrived yet, so I waited for him in the hallway outside the suite. With my eyes adjusted to the lowered light, I could just make out the memorabilia on the walls. Not well enough to read the texts, but enough to recognize the faces in the photographs. There was Gordo shaking hands with the mayor of Seattle, and there was Leroy Theroux grinning through a cascade of champagne after last year’s playoff victory, and there…

  Half a dozen photos later, I pressed the button on my light-up watch face. Come on, George, I haven’t got all night. At last I gave up on him and returned down the corridor toward the double doors. Probably went to the rotunda after all, the idiot. I’d better make sure Eugene’s on duty for the ceremony Sunday, or else—

  Suddenly I heard a sound that lifted the hair on the back of my neck like a frightened cat’s. Suddenly it was the night of the murder again, just moments before I encountered Digger’s corpse. Walking down this same corridor, I had heard this same little sound.

  A door clicking shut, in a side passage not far from where I stood. Only this time the sound was followed by a man’s voice fading into the distance. I couldn’t make out the words, but after a moment the voice rose to a muffled shouting. Someone was in trouble.

  I found the door in seconds and raced down one hallway, around a corner and down another, to stumble at last into a large and rather peculiar room. Rows of folding chairs faced a podium complete with microphone, and a video camera stood on a tripod in the center aisle. The wall behind the podium was covered by a repeating pattern of Navigator logos like some kind of baseball-mad wallpaper.

  The logos were there, I realized later, to make a backdrop for TV cameras. This was the team’s media interview room. But I didn’t take that in at first because my gaze was riveted on the room’s only occupant: Nelly Tibbett.

  Nelly was standing at the podium, or rather clutching it to hold himself upright. The Navigators jacket was gone, and his light gray polo shirt, hanging loose over his paunch, was stained with sweat under the arms and down the chest. He didn’t react to my presence, and no wonder. With his slackened mouth and disheveled hair, his face a grayish yellow in the harsh fluorescent light, he looked drunk almost to unconsciousness.

  “Years!” he was saying plaintively, his sorrowful hound’s eyes glinting with tears. “Worked my guts out for years, and now I get thrown out like some nobody. You don’t understand what it’s been like…Everybody remembers the heroes, nobody’s going to remember me.”

  His eyes wandered across the empty chairs, and I had the eerie feeling that for Nelly they weren’t empty. He was making his case to an imaginary audience. Of reporters, or fellow ballplayers? Or maybe everyone in his life who had ever dismissed his talents or condemned his failings. Or who now, in his fevered mind, rose up to accuse him of something dreadful.

  “No!” The word tore itself from Nelly’s throat, as he shouted at some ghost in the back of the room. “I couldn’t help it, don’t you see? He made me do it, I couldn’t help it!”

  I had to ask. “What couldn’t you help doing, Nelly? Who made you do it?”

  He looked blearily in my direction, unfazed by the appearance of a real person in the midst of his phantoms.

  “Duvall,” he said, as if the single word explained everything.

  And maybe it did. Maybe Digger’s dysfunctional family, and his ferreting around about Gordo, were both red herrings here. Take an arrogant power-monger who can’t keep his mouth shut, add a drunken loser about to lose the job that provides his only shred of dignity, and what do you get? Maybe Digger told Nelly the bad news, and Nelly killed the messenger. His next words seemed to confirm it.

  “Duvall kept laughing at me,” said Nelly, as if pleading for my understanding. Or my forgiveness? “He said he could get me my job back, but he wasn’t going to…What else could I do?”

  Nelly left the podium and moved closer to me. I backed away toward the door and slid a hand into my pocket, wishing that my phone wasn’t a flip-up. I could probably outrun the man, drunk as he was, but there was no guarantee. And half the world carried a gun these days. I needed that speed-dial ASAP, but I’d have to pull the phone out first.

  “Nothing,” I said gently, my fingers curling around the smooth metal shell. “There was nothing else you could do. I understand completely.”

  “You do?”

  “Absolutely. Let’s sit down and talk about it, all right? Go on, take a seat in that chair right behind you.”

  Everything happened at once. As Nelly looked vaguely around, I dragged out the phone, flipped it open, and stabbed the speed-dial button. But he took alarm at my sudden movement and lunged toward me with
a yell. I leaped away from him—and right into a folding chair.

  I’ve never been physically nimble—Lily comes right out and calls me clumsy—and somehow the chair turned into a leg-hold trap that snared both my ankles and brought me crashing face-down to the floor. I brought my hands up to shield myself, the phone skittered away, and as I grabbed for it in vain, I saw Nelly’s shoes just feet from my face.

  I’ve never been all that brave, either. Cringing, I cried out, “Don’t!”

  But the shoes stopped, and Nelly’s raving resumed as if I were no longer there.

  “Nobody’s going to remember me,” he croaked out. “I’m glad Duvall’s dead! He was such a bastard, he deserved it! He laughed at me, and I hated him, I hated the son of a bitch.”

  He went on like that for a couple of minutes, but I wasn’t listening. Slowly, painstakingly, I was trying to extricate myself from the chair without drawing Nelly’s attention away from his own hysteria. If I could get to my feet I’d make a run for it.

  But by the time I stood up, Nelly had turned away from me, sobbing, and somehow I no longer feared him. His shoulders were bowed and heaving, his voice an unintelligible jumble of impotent anger and abject misery. I kept a clear line of escape between me and the door, but somehow all I felt now was pity.

  “It’s OK,” I said soothingly, as if to a child. “Nelly, don’t. Try to—”

  “I should be dead too!” He swung toward me, his eyes wild. “After what I did, I should be dead!”

  With that he fled from the room by a different door, to leave me frantically scanning the floor for my phone. I was afraid he’d stepped on it, but in fact I couldn’t see it at all. So after a few minutes of searching, and another few of indecision, I followed Nelly Tibbett. Fools rush in and all that, but what else can you do when someone threatens suicide?

  Nelly wasn’t hard to follow as he lumbered through the maze of service hallways. I caught up with him just as he emerged from the building onto the outdoor concourse where we first met. It was dim, as it had been that night, illuminated only by the bright doorway that sent my shadow stretching out ahead of me.

  I called after Nelly to stop, but he made a rapid if wavering line for the railing where I’d watched him throwing bread to the gulls. The breeze was a fitful wind now, and a gust of it seemed to snatch away my words.

  “Wait, please, let’s talk about this. You don’t have to—”

  “Stop right there!” he shouted.

  I stopped.

  Awkward and unsteady, Nelly wobbled on one leg as he swung the other over the railing. His foot must have found an edge on the outer surface, because he stood astride the rail before he looked back at me. His face turned toward me, round and pale, hollow-eyed. Remembering the gulls wheeling down and down toward First Avenue far below, I froze in place and kept silent.

  “Tell them I’m sorry,” said Nelly, his raised voice breaking on the word. “Tell Rob that I—No!”

  A long shadow, a man’s, materialized from behind me, and I turned to see George, the security guard, rushing onto the concourse with a gun in his hand. He shouted something, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t make sense of anything, as I stood there in the gusty darkness staring at the concourse rail.

  Nelly Tibbett was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “The police found a bloodstained shirt in Nelly’s apartment,” I told Aaron as I prodded bleakly at my penne alla grappa. It was lunchtime on Friday, but our romantic rendezvous at Luigi’s Grotto had begun with a post-mortem on Nelly Tibbett. “They’re pretty sure it’s Digger’s blood.”

  Aaron nodded, somber and attentive. His plane had been late, so he’d come straight to the restaurant from the airport, and he had to report in at the Sentinel once we were finished. Just as well, since I was asleep on my feet. I’d been up late with the police, then gotten up early to fill Eddie in on the situation. I was hoping for a nap before the engagement dinner with Mom and Owen tonight.

  “I’m surprised the cops got a search warrant based on a hearsay confession,” Aaron said. “Especially hearsay from someone like you, with a vested interest in springing the prime suspect. But they took your word for it, even Starkey?”

  “He didn’t want to.” I set down my fork and sighed. I didn’t have much appetite. “But the weirdest thing happened.”

  I explained how I’d dropped my cell phone there in the interview room, then failed to find it after Nelly fled. Later, as I was being questioned and the dead man’s remains were being collected from the surface of First Avenue, one of the crime scene officers spotted a tiny blinking light in the darkness under the podium.

  “The phone was still on,” I said. “I was trying to speed-dial security, but I hit Beau’s number instead. His phone was on voice mail, so everything Nelly shouted at me was recorded. After they heard that, they had to believe me. Beau was furious when they confiscated his phone for evidence.”

  I smiled a little at the thought, but Aaron went on staring into the candle flame between us. Luigi’s is wonderfully dim even in daytime, with dark red walls and shadowy alcoves and murky little oil paintings of Rome.

  “I wonder,” he said, sipping at his Barolo. He’d already polished off his rigatoni verde. “I wonder how it played out that night. Tibbett must have followed Duvall out of the party, although I didn’t notice him.”

  “No one ever noticed Nelly. It’s like he was invisible. When Eddie and I were trying to establish alibis on Monday, hardly anyone remembered that Nelly was even at the party in the first place.”

  Aaron’s left eyebrow went up. It was always just the left one, and I loved how that looked.

  “Alibis? You promised me you’d let the police do their job on this.”

  “But they weren’t doing it! And besides—”

  “Besides,” he said with a resigned smile, “it’s all over now, so there’s no point arguing. Though I bet Starkey will be glad to get you out of his hair.”

  I chuckled, but inside I was wincing with guilt. At my interview with Detective Starkey last night, I had been wracked with indecision. Hand over Digger’s notebook, or continue to keep it secret? I’d left my shoulder bag in the interview room when I ran after Nelly, then quietly retrieved it while the scene-of-crime people were fooling with my cell phone. And all during Starkey’s questioning I clutched it tightly in my lap—and of course it didn’t occur to Starkey to examine a witness’s purse.

  In the end I kept the notebook secret. Why start rumors about Gordo, now that Digger’s killer was dead? The coded scribblings were just speculation anyway. Of course, I had a selfish motive too—protecting myself from the charge of withholding evidence. My conscience was so uneasy, I hadn’t even looked at the notebook since. I was sick of the damn thing, and sick of this whole sordid affair.

  Aaron, meanwhile, was still puzzling things out. “Duvall must have thrown it in Tibbett’s face that he’d be getting fired soon, and Tibbett just snapped.”

  “The poor man,” I said, half to myself. “I’ve never seen anyone so miserable.”

  Aaron’s hand felt warm and reassuring as he placed it over mine.

  “Tibbett was a murderer, Carnegie. And he took his own way out. I’m just sorry you had to be there.”

  “But if I hadn’t been there, maybe he wouldn’t have—”

  “Hey now, none of that.” He squeezed my fingers. “If Tibbett were still alive, other people might be in danger. Including you, Nancy Drew. And Boris would be standing trial. You cleared him, just like you wanted. Congratulations.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Quit beating yourself up.” He lifted the last of his wine in a toast. “Here’s to Boris Nevsky, long may he wave. And here’s to you, Stretch.”

  The rims of our glasses kissed with a tiny chime, and I suddenly remembered something.

  “The surprise! I’m sorry, Aaron. I’ve been so caught up in all this that I forgot to ask. What’s your surprise?”

 
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. This isn’t the time, with you so upset and—”

  “Believe me, this is exactly the time. I’m happy about Boris, of course, but last night was so ghastly.” I took a deep breath and blew it out, trying to move on from Nelly’s tragedy to my own love story. “Please, if you’ve got good news, I want to hear it.”

  “All right, but it isn’t news.” Aaron reached into his breast pocket and drew out a small envelope, brittle with age. “It’s this.”

  He tipped the envelope onto his palm, and I caught a flash of crimson in the candlelight. In his hand lay a slender gold ring with a single ruby, Burmese by the depth of its color, circled by a delicate halo of bead-set diamonds.

  “It was my grandmother’s, so it’s kind of old-fashioned, but I was hoping you’d like it. Um, do you like it?”

  “Aaron, it’s exquisite. I love it.”

  “Oh, good.” He grinned with relief and tried to slip the jewel onto my ring finger—but it jammed at the knuckle.

  “It doesn’t fit!” he said, stricken. “God, I’m such an idiot, I didn’t even think about size. Rings come in sizes, don’t they?”

  Now I did the reassuring. “Yes, they do. Mine would be a seven and a half, and this is tiny, a five or even less. But rings can be resized. It’s done all the time.”

  I transferred the ring to my pinky, where it barely fit above the knuckle, and extended my arm in admiration. Our waiter, a barrel-shaped fellow with a piratical mustache, caught the gesture and bustled over.

  “The lady would like something else?” Then he saw the ring—and the looks on our faces—and flung his hands above his balding head. “The lady said yes! Bravo! Eh, Tonio, a song for the lady!”

  So Aaron and I, under almost-false pretenses, had to sit there while the waiters did violence to “That’s Amore” and the other diners looked on and sighed. Aaron was trying so hard not to laugh he had tears in his eyes, and if I had tears in mine, well, maybe I wanted a ring after all.