“Can’t stay, pal. I’m supposed to be moving tonight, but my office is a mess. I gotta get packing.” He smiled at me. “Anyway, you’ve gotten yourself mixed up with the police again, haven’t you? Better watch yourself. Next thing you know you’ll be in their computers.”
“What can I do?” I asked, smiling at him.
“It’s the computers that get you. They start tracking you, baby, and that’s all she wrote. Keep below their radar, Maddie. That’s the way.”
Paul was a major conspiracy theorist. We all have our hobbies.
Holly looked at me. “Maddie, maybe I could go over and help Paul. If you’re not going to be needing me this morning, I mean.”
“Great,” I said.
“Yeah?” Paul raised his head, relieved. “Excellent.”
“Okay,” Holly said, standing, grabbing her enormous mesh shoulder bag. “I’ll go catch Ray. See you tonight.”
“I’m going out for dinner tonight, actually.”
All eyes were suddenly on me.
“It’s Honnett.” I looked over at Paul. “He’s this cop I know. From before.”
“Right,” he said, deadpan. “The one that’s had the hots for you.”
“Hots?”
“That’s legalese,” Wes explained.
“Listen. He asked me a lot of questions last night. Naturally. Poor Vivian Duncan is dead. I told him I’d get together as much information as I could and we decided to go over it at dinner.”
They stared at me.
“What?”
“So is it a…?” Holly looked at me, hesitant to use the word “date.”
“Holly, get off of her case,” Paul said gruffly. “Can’t you see she’s got a business meeting?”
“Right,” I agreed.
But then, dammit! Paul hit us all with his three-beat grin.
It was just before lunch. Wes had gone out and I was sitting alone in my office, brooding. I had been trying to pull together all the papers I could find that related to Vivian Duncan and her business. Since she had been trying to woo us, her attorney had sent over a lot of documents that made her look very good on paper. In addition, she had also messengered over half a dozen memory books, albums of photos filled with samples of invitations and menus from many of her firm’s most lavish weddings.
Just then, Alba came to my office, filling up the doorway, looking full of purpose. She called out in her high-pitched voice, accented with Spanish, “Miss Madeline, there is a young lady at the door for you. She said is important.” Then she moved aside.
Behind her I could see a woman’s shape.
“Sara?”
Yesterday’s bride walked on into my office and stood there, silently. Alba took the cue to leave.
“You didn’t go on your honeymoon.” As if their entire wedding, and all their future memories of it, hadn’t been screwed up enough already!
She shook her head.
“Oh, Sara. Sit down. Is there anything…”
“He’s gone.” She stood in front of the large desk I usually shared with Wesley and stared at it. “Brent is gone.”
“What do you mean?” I was suddenly alarmed.
“He just took off. I haven’t seen him all night. We were…we were supposed to leave on our honeymoon this morning.” She looked at her watch. “A few hours ago, I guess it is.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Grandfather was sending us on a photo safari, but now those plans are ruined. They said we couldn’t leave.” She shook her head at the harsh memory. “Even Brent’s dad’s friends couldn’t pull any strings. Let me tell you, my grandfather was furious!”
I imagined that Big Jack Gantree was on the phone with a U.S. senator even as we spoke.
“But I thought you said Brent was missing.”
“It’s the last straw! Last night, we were separated for a while. And then, later, I couldn’t find him anywhere. He just disappeared.”
“From the wedding?”
She nodded, and then all at once her lovely young face crumpled. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her nose began to run.
“I left the dinner. Just for a minute, I told him. And then…”
“That’s when you came out and saw…”
Her tears kept coming. “Then the police wouldn’t let me go back into the dinner. No one would let me back into my own…my own wedding.”
I’m very fast on the Kleenex. I had a new box over to her in about two seconds.
“Thank you,” she sniffed, pulling tissues from the box, one at a time, until she had a fistful.
“So you didn’t see Brent,” I said.
“No. When they finally, finally, finally…” She honked into the tissues and then wadded them up. “When they let me back into the hall, the tables were all moved around. My friends had already gone home. My grandfather was beside himself by then to let everyone go. They were old, some of my great-aunts, you know? But Brent…I just…He just was gone.” She threw the wad of Kleenex onto the desk, bursting into fresh tears.
“Great wedding, huh? Great memories. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out.” She attacked the box of tissues again. One by one, her fingers grabbed them into a ball.
“Sara, honey, you have no idea where Brent might be? Did you call his family?”
“Of course I did. He never came home. I called everyone, even his relatives, the ones that came to town for the wedding.” She sniffed. “Nobody’s seen him.”
“He’s probably just upset.”
“He’s upset?” She looked at me, aghast, her point of a chin quivering. “I’m upset! And I don’t want to tell the police he’s missing,” Sara whined on, before blowing her nose in the handful of tissues.
Why, I wondered, had she come to tell me all this?
“My grandfather says,” Sara dabbed at her eyes, carefully, “that you are friends with Chuck Honnett.”
That’s right. Lt. Honnett, the old school buddy of the missing bridegroom’s father, should be told about this.
“If we go to him, he’ll have to make a report. Make it official. But Grandfather thought that you…well, could you ask him to find Brentie for me? Sort of off the record?”
“Sara. They don’t do that. You need to make an official…”
“No. I will not go to the police and tell them my new husband hasn’t had the balls to come home on his own wedding night!”
Chapter 11
It was turning out to be one of those days.
“Don’t expect me to cry.”
Vivian Duncan’s daughter, Beryl, with her short brown hair, and her fierce gray eyes, and her navy Brooks Brothers suit, appeared calm.
“Okay,” I said, folding a kitchen towel.
Beryl had insisted it was imperative that we meet about her mother’s business, right away. When I tried to talk her out of it, she insisted on coming over. I felt myself sinking another inch deeper into wedding consultant quicksand.
Wes says people like to bounce things off of me. I make people comfy. It’s my curse. Holly thinks it’s less complicated than that. She said people hang around because of the food. I wondered, looking at Beryl: succor or sugar?
“Here’s the irony,” Beryl was saying. “Now that my mother is dead, everybody feels so sorry for me.” Her voice trailed down low. “Which is really funny. You’d have to know my family to get it. Vivian was not the traditional mother. She had very high standards. Extremely high. I never…” Beryl took a deep breath and plunged on. “I was a disappointment. When she found the time to notice me. Now that Vivian is dead, I’m finding it hard to feel very sad. She was not a nice woman.”
It might surprise you, but listening to Beryl Duncan trash her dead mother didn’t strike me as shocking. It all depends on what you expect from people. What I expect is: people are weird. This viewpoint has always worked for me. It allows for a lot of, frankly, odd behavior to cross my path without need for constant judgement.
My feeling is, no one can know wha
t’s going on with another human being, no matter how many daytime talk shows one might watch. I’m practical. Since I don’t have the energy to be walking a mile in everyone else’s bloody moccasins, I just give everybody credit for having suffered through lousy childhoods and leave it at that.
In fact, it’s kind of a good guideline for living. Cut ’em some slack. Tread softly. Be careful how you judge. I figure you never know what hellacious pain the average jerk is in, so be kind. Come to think of it, this attitude of mine may explain why people I hardly know keep turning up. And like Beryl, they tend to unload.
“Do you think I might have a taste of that?” Beryl was checking out the large bucket of homemade ice cream on the counter.
Or, then again, maybe Holly was right about the food thing.
I’d been working on a new ice cream recipe with my brand new toy when Beryl had insisted on a visit.
“It’s almost ready.” I went to a drawer and pulled out a silver teaspoon.
“Vivian was not cut out to be a mother,” Beryl continued, perching on the edge of a stool, resting her plain hands on the marble countertop. She didn’t wear any rings, I noticed, and her nails were short and unpolished. “It was all about her. Always. The rest of us didn’t exist. Or, no—we existed as accessories. When I was very young, she used to order her hairstylist to bleach my hair, too, so Vivian’s blond would seem real. I was only four. She was embarrassed at the preschool mothers’ day luncheon or something. She thought I was throwing off her image, I guess. And I was so young, what did I know? I thought mommy hated me.”
See what I mean? Everybody has had a lousy childhood. Even if they weren’t beaten, there are still scars.
Beryl ran her hand though her cropped brown hair. “And do you want to know what’s really pathetic? I just stopped coloring it. Years of therapy, let me tell you, just to free myself from peroxide.”
I pushed a spatula into the ice cream. Firm to hardish. Nice. Not that I wasn’t sympathetic to Beryl and her “issues,” exactly, but then I couldn’t let my pet project melt, either. In any case, it didn’t seem to matter. She just kept on talking.
“I realize the woman is dead now, but Vivian was an unhappy woman. She was a hollow, miserable, self-centered, ego-driven…”
Beryl needed to get it all out. When she took another breath, I fully expected her to speak even more ill of the dead. Instead, she seemed to run out of venom. “What flavor is that?”
“It’s experimental. I call it Deep, Dark Brown Sugar.”
“Really.” Beryl picked up a silver teaspoon and fiddled with it.
Although it was not quite lunch hour, was there ever really a wrong time for ice cream?
“By the way,” Beryl said, “if I can ask…why did you tell all those stories to the police?”
I looked up at her, drawing a blank.
“Last night,” she said. “You really slammed my father.”
“They get pretty pissed if you don’t answer direct questions,” I said. “I’ve found this out through past experience.”
“So who cares what the police think?” Beryl had the typical lawyer’s viewpoint.
“Sorry, Beryl. Your dad was fighting with your mother last night. Other people may have heard them. I don’t think the police will necessarily…”
Lest I forget, in her everyday life Beryl was a tough lawyer, and by the tone of her comments, I was getting a dose of her lawyer style. Beryl’s look of intense, oh-give-me-a-break-ness stopped me cold.
“Can we cut the crap? Someone broke Vivian’s neck. They say she couldn’t have jumped. They don’t think she fell. So what does that make it? Cops don’t have much imagination. Naturally, they figure my father murdered Vivian.”
“Did they arrest him?”
“Not yet.”
“Then there may be other suspects.”
She met my gaze. “I have a lovely alibi for the time after I left my mother at the museum.”
“Oh.”
“Ah, you’re surprised. As it happens, I was a guest on an Internet chat show for the full hour between eight and nine last night. My sources at Parker Center tell me Vivian was killed sometime after eight-fifteen. So I’m in the clear. But my poor father isn’t so lucky.”
I couldn’t help myself. I started wondering who else might have wanted to see Vivian Duncan dead. And just because one is typing away on an Internet chat, is there really no way to get another person to continue typing for you while you slip away? Or…
“So why are you doing that?” she asked, swerving the topic back to ice cream. By now, I was on subject-shift alert and took it in stride.
I had scooped mounds of the fresh Deep, Dark Brown Sugar ice cream onto a tray. I was starting to squeeze and pat them, using plastic wrap to protect my hands, into perfectly sculpted palm-sized balls.
“After I mold them into works of art,” I explained, with just the right touch of modesty, “they go into the freezer. Three hours. Then we’ll roll them…”
“Roll them?”
“In toppings. Like shredded coconut or bittersweet shavings or chopped nuts and cinnamon or mini white chocolate chips. Each one different. They should look nice piled up on a platter.”
I’ve often found myself settling down, destressing, by the simple steps and movements necessary in working with food. As Vivian’s mixed-up daughter sat there watching my hands go about their swift work, the rhythm of ice cream molding seemed to have a settling effect on Beryl Duncan as well. A little more thoughtfully, then, she introduced yet another subject.
“Aren’t you a little curious why I’m here?”
“Curious?” I looked up at her and smiled. “Beryl, I’m curious about everything. Trust me. It’s one of my most endearing weaknesses. Or so my friends keep telling me.”
“Then why haven’t you asked?”
“I figured you would tell me when you were ready. I imagine your mother’s death is a terrible shock.”
For a split second I caught sight of an expression that might resemble sadness, but it was quickly replaced by her usual disapproving facade. “Well, it’s about her wretched business. Who is going to take over Mother’s work? She’s got weddings scheduled for two years solid.”
I stopped patting my ice cream balls. All those poor future brides, I thought. Now here were young women who were probably weeping over the loss of Vivian Duncan.
“Mother told me you were buying her company. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. Vivian never told me anything. Whisper told me. But now, Vivian is dead and she’s left a terrible mess. Anyway, the point is, the reason I rushed over here today is, I think you should do the weddings.”
I had just spent the better part of last night trying to disentangle myself from Vivian’s clawish dreams. But here I was again, just like in one of those unalterable recurring nightmares, sinking deeper and deeper, unable to wriggle out from the death grasp of Vivian’s determination.
“Beryl, it was all a mistake. I never wanted Vivian’s company. Besides, I’m in no position to buy it. It was all something Vivian was dreaming up.”
“Don’t tell me that. I can’t cope with that!”
“Why don’t you have some ice cream?” I suggested. “We’ll figure something out.” I pulled down two pink bowls from my Metlox collection.
“Deep, Dark Brown Sugar,” she said, after a thoughtful spoonful. “It’s brilliant. But what’s that other flavor that makes it seem so intense?”
It always came. They always want to know the secret ingredient.
“My secret,” I said conspiratorially, like a magician revealing his trick, “is sour cream.”
“Wow.”
“You have to add it just before the ice cream begins to set.”
Beryl regarded me. “So will you help me?” She had finished her ice cream. “Let’s leave buying the business out of it. Will you help me?”
“Why not Whisper Pettibone? Isn’t he the best choice?”
“Yes. Whisper has the mast
er planner in his office and he should be doing all of this work! But who knows where that man is? I’ve been trying to call him all night and all morning, but I can’t find him. He won’t pick up his cell phone. And he’s not answering my pages, either.” She sighed. “He was very close to Vivian. He’s probably a mess.”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up.” I hoped he’d turn up. And soon. I couldn’t help but notice the sucking sound as the quicksand rose over my ankles.
“Look, please, could you just do me this favor? The master planner sits on Whisper’s desk. Just go down there and get the schedule, so we can start making calls. I’m late for a meeting as it is. I’m getting a good defense attorney for my dad. Just in case.”
She placed a small key ring, which contained two keys, on the island counter between us.
“I’d like to help you. Just so you understand that I will not be taking on any weddings, okay? As long as…”
“Thanks! You’re great,” she cut me off. “When you get the date book, if you’d call all the brides, that would be a start.”
“You want me to call?”
Beryl looked at me from under plain eyelids that had probably never held a dab of eyeshadow. “I’ve never been married, okay? I specialize in divorce. I don’t know how to talk to those women. Can’t you smooze them or something?”
“Schmooze,” I corrected.
“You’re perfect. Look, Madeline. I’ve had you checked out. You are smarter than you look.”
I glanced up at her.
“I mean, for a caterer.”
“Hmm. Thanks.”
“You know what I mean. You know a little more than just how to add sour cream to bring out the flavor. I think,” she continued looking straight at me, “that you’re interested in what happened to Vivian. You told me yourself, you’re curious. And you’re a natural detective. One of your clients was killed last year and the word was you were responsible for finding the killer. Isn’t that right?”
“Well…”
Okay, I couldn’t help myself. I was curious. Why had young bridegroom Brent and slimy old Whisper Pettibone both disappeared? Had they, I thrilled, slipped away together? On the young man’s wedding night? And, really, there were so many other questions bubbling to the surface.
Killer Wedding Page 8