“Never mind, just listen.” The clamor of voices all around us, combined with the band’s upbeat background music, created a sense of seclusion. I described the way Gordo had reacted to the mention of steroids, and how convinced I now was of his innocence. “So I guess it must have been Nelly Tibbett all along.”
Aaron listened solemnly, but I could see him suppressing a smile. “You think so, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, thank God for that!” He snorted with laughter. “The more I thought about it today, the more nutty your theory sounded. Here I’ve been trying to figure out a way to convince you to drop the whole thing, and now you saved me the trouble.”
“But what about last night?” I protested, feeling strangely let down. “You were so into the whole idea.”
“You have that effect on me, Nancy Drew.” He nodded at the ruby ring. “That’s why I gave you that. C’mere.”
Aaron hugged me to his side, and as the heady aroma of warm chocolate wafted up to us, I forgot all about murder and hugged him back. Then, highly contented, we leaned over the railing to peer downward. Justin was doing a nice job down there, handing out little plates and instructing guests on how to dip their chosen goodies.
A chocolate fountain is basically a heater for melting the chocolate with a big stainless-steel column on top. The column has a corkscrew-shaped blade inside that draws the thick liquid upward and releases it in a slowly descending flow of delectability. I watched a little boy poke a pretzel stick into the glistening brown curtain and then pop it in his mouth. My own mouth watered.
“Should we have a chocolate fountain?” I said.
“What, in our living room?”
“No, idiot, at our wedding reception.”
“Is this what you want, Stretch?” Aaron glanced around the rotunda with narrowed eyes. “Something as fancy as all this?”
“Well, not quite on this scale, but—” I turned to face him. “What about you, Aaron. What do you want?”
“What else?” He kissed me lightly. “All I want is you.”
“And you shall have me,” I said, “but not until later. I’ve got to go.”
“Me too. Now that we’re not snooping today, I’m heading over to the office. But tell me something first.” Aaron paused, looking ill at ease. “Um, was that all right last night about asking Dree and Kimmie to be bridesmaids? I was trying to get involved, like you wanted, but you didn’t look too happy about it.”
“Happy? About being preceded down the aisle by the Bitch Sisters?”
He winced. “Sorry. I just thought, since they’re going to be your relatives soon—”
“I’ll handle it,” I said, though I had no idea how. “Maybe they’ll love Belize so much they’ll never come back.”
“There’s a thought. Call you later.”
We parted at the bottom of the escalator, Aaron for the exit and me for the cake table. Juice’s giant baseball was deliciously witty—and even bigger than I’d expected, at least a hundred pounds of cheesecake waiting to be devoured. Just as I’d planned, the pedestal arrangement prevented anyone from touching it, but lots of folks were snapping pictures. I checked in with the designated cake-slicer and moved on to the other tables.
“Hey there, gal!”
Buck Buckmeister tipped up his bag of Cracker Jack to get at the last fragments, smacked his lips over them, and gave me a big smile. Beside him little Betty was working on a hot dog as long as her forearm. They both wore Navigator caps, Navigator jackets over Navigator T-shirts, and for all I knew, Navigator underwear. No half-measures for the Killer B’s.
“Having fun?” I asked them.
“You bet!” Buck bellowed, that being his normal volume. “This here’s almost as good as the wingding you put on for our Bonnie. Hey, we just got some news from her!”
I looked from him to Betty, and from the sparkle in her shoe-button eyes I guessed right away.
“She’s expecting?”
“Due in April,” said the proud grandma-to-be, and took another bite of her wiener. “In fact they might name her April, only that doesn’t start with B, does it?”
As I agreed that this was an issue to be considered, the band swung into a salsa beat, and the three of us turned toward the dance floor. Time for the wedded couple’s first dance, which, in honor of Gordo’s birthplace, was to be a merengue.
“Ain’t they something?” Buck marveled.
They were indeed. For all his size, Gordo moved deftly through the intricate pattern of steps, while he and Rose undulated their shoulders and hips in rapid but sultry harmony. The crowd whistled and stamped as he spun his bride around and around, then gathered her to him in a sudden twining of arms.
“Bravo!” I called out. “They must have practiced for—”
“Jiminy Christmas,” said Buck. “What’s that young feller up to over there?”
He nodded toward the chocolate fountain. I followed his gaze and groaned: JD was back, arguing heatedly with the same security guard who’d removed him the first time. Justin had backed away in concern, and the guard looked baffled, as well he might.
Loud and distraught, JD was already drawing stares. But frog-marching him out of the building would cause a sensation, and not a good one. At least most of the guests were focused on the dancing. I darted through a gap in the crowd, pulling out my cell phone as I went and speed-dialing the other guards.
“Trouble at the chocolate fountain. Get this guy out of here, quietly and now.”
As I arrived at the scene, things suddenly got worse. Much worse. JD tried to push past the guard, they grappled, and then JD fell back and pulled a small black pistol from his jacket. He didn’t point it at anybody, but that didn’t help much.
“If Rose won’t talk to me,” he said grimly, “I swear to God I’m gonna blow my head off. It’s loaded too, don’t think it isn’t. I’m not kidding, you bring Rose over here.”
The guard froze, and so did I, but my brain didn’t. A gun! The crowd could panic, jam the exits. Not another suicide, not after Nelly. Not after Digger’s bloody corpse. Oh God, a gun.
Behind me the salsa tune speeded up, rose to a climax, and ended with a blare of brass and a burst of applause. JD hesitated, his attention wavering, and as he did, a black-clad figure stepped in front of me. Rob Harmon strode quickly up to JD, spoke a few words I didn’t hear, and slid the gun into the pocket of his tuxedo.
Just like that.
Given the events of the past week, my nerves weren’t too steady to start with. I sagged back against the fountain table, pressing cold fingers to my trembling lips and trying to remember how to inhale. Rob and the guard took JD by the arms and began to move him toward the nearest exit. As they passed, I watched JD’s face. The fight had gone out of him, but his eyes were still wide and staring, and—
“Bitch!”
JD lashed out at me with one booted foot. His captors wrenched him aside and hustled him away, but only after he caught me right on the kneecap. It hurt like hell, and as I leaped backward my feet flew out from under me and my full weight came down on the table edge. The table teetered, its cloth dragged forward as I slid to the ground, the fountain rocked on its moorings…and the rest was a foregone conclusion.
I wound up on the floor, surrounded by gawking guests, with a lap full of apricots and a stream of warm Valrhona pouring down my hair and over my chest to join them.
“What the blue blazes are you doing down there?” Leroy Theroux, as bad luck would have it, hadn’t seen JD at all. But he’d caught the first candy-dipped wedding planner in history, and he was not amused. “Things are getting crazier and crazier around here! First it’s Duvall, and then it’s Lionel Goddamn Tibbett, and now it’s this!”
“I can explain,” I said, struggling to get up. Justin reached out a hand to help me, while one of the less charitable onlookers took a flash picture. “You see—”
“Never mind explaining!” Leroy snapped. “Just get yourself gone!”
And so I did.
Chapter Thirty-six
“You washed it off?” Aaron sounded inconsolable. “No fair! I always wanted a chocolate-covered girl.”
“Very funny.” I tilted my wet head away from the telephone and scrubbed at my hair with a towel. “Leroy Theroux was furious, and so was Beau. He told me not to come back, but of course I have to—to—”
My lips kept moving, but no sound came out. I dropped the towel and clutched at my throat in horror.
“Are you there? Hey, Stretch? Hello?”
I shook out the towel and then opened my robe. No gold chain. No ruby ring.
“Um, gosh, I just noticed the time.” Frantically, I checked around the floor of my bedroom. Nothing. “I have to go back to the stadium, Aaron. The reception must be almost over. Talk to you later, OK?”
“All right. Just stay away from kids with guns.”
The moment he said goodbye, I tossed the phone aside and dropped to hands and knees to peer under the bed. Then I checked the bathroom floor, the bathtub drain—with its fine-meshed strainer, thank God—and all my chocolate-stained clothing. No sign of Grandma Bella’s ring.
Swearing breathlessly, I jumped into jeans and sweatshirt and backtracked my way through the houseboat. Then out to the parking lot, where the sun was still shining but a chilly wind licked at my wet hair. I patted down Vanna’s front seats and pulled out the floor mats. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
As I drove downtown, I mentally backtracked my way through the wedding. When did I last notice the ring? I’d touched it during the ceremony, that was definite, and then Aaron had said something about it. I’d meant to show it to the Buckmeisters, but Buck had spotted JD and—
“Oh, shit,” I said aloud, and barely made my turn onto Aurora Avenue. “The chocolate fountain!”
At some point in my tumble against the fountain’s table, the chain must have come loose or even broken. With all those liquefied calories oozing around, and the cleanup that followed, the ring could have easily been scooped into the garbage.
I drove faster, trying to reconstruct the details of the incident. The tablecloth bunched beneath me, the apricots in my lap…Had I noticed a glint from the ruby, had I felt the chain give way? The crowd gathering, Leroy yelling about Lionel Goddamn Tibbett…
Lionel Tibbett…Lionel Tibbett? What if LT wasn’t Leroy Theroux? What if he was Nelly Tibbett?
The truck ahead of me braked, and Vanna damn near ran right up his tailpipe. I slowed down and proceeded more cautiously, setting aside for the moment my fears about the ring. Nothing I could do about it till I got to Yesler Field, and meanwhile I had some thinking to do.
Because if Nelly was the LT mentioned in the notebook—and that made sense, with Leroy Theroux so adamantly antisteroids—then what was it he knew that Digger was so curious about? And was that knowledge a motive for murder? That piece still didn’t make sense.
Threading through the traffic around Pioneer Square, I realized something. Despite my conversation with Aaron in the gallery, I still couldn’t convince myself that Nelly, the man I’d seen feeding the seagulls, was the man who killed Digger Duvall with a baseball bat. Yet the police were convinced.
As I reached Yesler Field, I strained to remember everything I knew about Nelly Tibbett, which was little enough. His career had been mediocre, so if he used steroids himself, they didn’t help him much. And he’d worked as a batting coach for the Navigators, but according to Gordo he wouldn’t have seen any drug use in Seattle, at least not since Theroux came on board.
So what did LT know? Tibbett’s playing days with the Red Sox seemed too long ago to use for a news story now, but I wondered what he’d done with himself between then and his job with the Navs. That could be researched, of course.
Of course, but why bother? I steered Vanna into the lot near the loading dock and yanked on the brake with a discouraged sigh. It didn’t matter much now. Poor Nelly was dead, and his motives would hardly interest anyone among the living. Besides, I had my own mystery to solve. Where the hell was that ring?
The reception wasn’t almost over; it was over. Inside the rotunda the gazebo was denuded of flowers and the cleaning crew was almost finished. I threaded my way through the trash barrels full of wadded paper napkins and crumpled peanut bags, praying that my engagement ring wasn’t lying at the bottom of one of them. Then I reached the center of the space and circled the gazebo toward what had been Eugene’s station.
It was completely vacated. The table was still in place, stripped of its cloth and scrubbed clean, and the aroma of chocolate still hung in the air. But the fountain itself was gone, along with the plates of goodies, the napkins, everything. I could have wept.
“’Scuse me, Miss Kincaid?” Eugene, the dependable security guard, approached me with a hopeful expression on his creased old face and a platter in his gnarled old hands. The platter held a heap of biscotti, macaroons, pretzel rods, and dried apricots, mixed higgledy-piggledy in a most un-caterer way. “There was a lot of sweets left over, and I was wondering, could the fellas bring some home to their kids?”
“Sure, why not? Be a shame to waste it all.” I picked up a pretzel and munched it miserably. Might as well fortify myself. All those trash barrels to search, and probably the Dumpsters outside.
“What the hey?” said Eugene. “Careful, there’s a piece a wire or something in there. Almost looks like a—”
“A ring?” I poked frenetically into the heap. “Is it…? It can’t be…Oh, Eugene, it is!”
A moment later you couldn’t tell who was the more amazed: me because I had Bella’s ruby clutched safely in my hand, or Eugene because I’d wrapped my arms around him and was kissing him in gratitude. My gold chain was long gone, but that didn’t matter. The chain must have snapped and sent the ring flying into a tray of dipping items, from which it had been dumped into the platter.
“I can’t believe it!” I said, releasing him. “You have no idea how important this is.”
“What’s so important?” drawled a soft voice, and the fading aroma of chocolate was joined by the musky scent of Rob Harmon’s cologne. He had changed from tuxedo into slacks and a windbreaker, and carried an oversize gym bag by its handles with the shoulder strap dangling. “Must be something good.”
“Incredibly good,” I told him. “I lost my engagement ring when the fountain tipped over, but Eugene just found it for me.”
“Well, not so much found it as come upon it,” said the older man. “You lose anything else, Miss Kincaid, or can the fellas take the rest of the leftovers? We’re clearing out now.”
“They can have them all,” I said gaily. “I’ll be in the owners’ suite for a little, then I’ll lock up.”
As Eugene walked away, I turned back to Rob. “What a relief!”
“Glad to hear it.”
With the ring recovered, I refocused on the rest of the world. “So what happened with JD? And thank you so much for stepping in. That could have been a nightmare.”
“Your security people took care of him,” said Rob in those honeyed Virginian tones. Was I mistaken, or was his accent getting stronger? “I don’t think the boy was capable of much, doped up like that.”
“Still, taking that gun from him was incredible.”
He shrugged. “No big thing. You get some strange goings-on during road trips sometimes.”
“And I suppose pitching is all about grace under pressure, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.” Rob smiled. “Yes, it is.”
And at that precise moment, looking into those unblinking blue eyes and breathing in that distinctive cologne, I knew. All the odd-shaped pieces clicked together like the pattern in a kaleidoscope, and I knew who really murdered Digger Duvall. And it wasn’t Nelly Tibbett. Oh, my God.
“Well,” I said, turning aside and trying hard to keep my voice level, “I’d better get back to work.”
“I’ll walk with you up to the suite,” Rob said lightly. “My plane’s not for a c
ouple of hours. I can help fetch and carry.”
I halted. “Um, that’s all right, don’t bother. In fact, maybe I’ll stay down here to supervise the cleaners…”
But when I looked around, the last of the cleaning crew was dragging out the last of the trash barrels, and the guards were nowhere to be seen. How had everyone disappeared so quickly? And how was I going to get away from Rob without tipping my hand?
“…and inventory the equipment,” I concluded, “and the, uh, rental furniture.”
Just go, I told myself, and took a deep breath to steady my vibrating nerves. No need to panic, just leave. But not too quickly, in case he suspects. And get close to that exit first. It’s nowhere near the van, but there’ll be people out there.
The inventory was a pointless and imaginary task, but I did it anyway, moving along the circumference of the rotunda toward the street exit, scribbling in a notebook as I went. Rob kept me company, ever so casually.
But why should he suspect? I thought. He doesn’t know what Boris said about the cologne—or that I’ve figured out that Boris must have smelled Rob’s cologne on Digger’s dead body. But don’t take the chance, just run for it the minute you can.
I had noticed the sportswriter’s cologne the night of the murder, and it was nothing at all like Rob’s. Boris must have been too drunk to tell when he was sitting with Digger, but later on the shock of coming upon a corpse made him register every last detail, including that musky scent in the air. Rob Harmon’s scent.
“It was a fine party,” said Rob, slinging the gym bag over his shoulder so he could slip his hands in his jacket pockets. “Rose said to say goodbye to you.”
“I’m sorry I missed her.” I forced a smile. “That chocolate took forever to get out of my hair.”
He chuckled as we continued around the ring of tables, our small talk echoing back at us from the lofty vault of the ceiling. I hardly knew what I was saying, so urgent were the ideas racing through my mind.
Rob must have seen Digger’s notebook in my hiking pack. He was the one who mugged me outside NocNoc, and when he didn’t get it then, he followed me into the stadium the night Nelly died. Why didn’t I think of him along with Gordo as a player who might have used drugs?
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