Bride and Doom

by Deborah Donnelly

  “Sure, no problem.” We were being polite with each other, which always made me nervous. “Will I see you, or—?”

  “I’d better go straight to my place. But I’ll be over bright and early Thursday for our hike.”

  That was better. “Terrific. I’ll make us the best picnic lunch you ever had.”

  “You mean make as in buy, right? I’m not sure I can hike and eat your cooking on the same day.”

  “Ha, ha.” Better yet. My cooking wasn’t that bad, but if Aaron could needle me about it, we were on safer ground. “I’ll buy us a wonderful picnic, wiseguy. Be nice to me, or I’ll forget to record your game.”

  “You could sure forget tonight’s game,” he said ruefully. “Are you watching?”

  “I’ve been busy with Buckmeisters.”

  “Understood. Well, the Cubs were down eight–zip when I left. Maybe a miracle will happen and they’ll rally. I pity the poor bastards if they finally get into the Series and then blow it. They’ve got a solid pitcher for tomorrow night, though—”

  “Aaron, can you hold on? I think someone’s at my door.”

  I looked through the peephole this time: nobody. Then as I turned away, I heard another little rat-a-tat. So I opened up, and there was Betty Buckmeister, too short to show up, holding out something in her hand. Something I stared at in shock.

  “’Scuse me, dear,” she said, “but I made Father turn the car right around so I could give you this. He found it on the floor after that party, and we thought maybe there was a central lost and found, but when he called Yesler Field they said that for private functions the person who scheduled the event usually collected these things—”

  I tried to stem the tide. “Betty—”

  “—and we thought that would be you, so Father meant to give it to you and then he kept forgetting! I always say that man doesn’t have a memory, he has a forgettery.”

  I nodded and smiled as she prattled away, and when she finally left I closed the door mechanically. Just as mechanically, I picked up the phone and finished my conversation with Aaron.

  Then I sat down at my kitchen table and began reading the little brown notebook written by the late unlamented Digger Duvall.

  Chapter Nineteen

  That damn notebook kept me up most of the night.

  The handwriting was tiny and cramped, and Digger used a sort of personal shorthand that made very little sense to me. After the first hour or so of scrutinizing the dog-eared pages, my eyes were crossing and my brain was blank.

  I got up and wandered from room to empty room, finally turning on the television just for company. The game was still going, and the Cubs were still getting pounded. I knew just how they felt.

  I tried calling Eddie, to see if he could come over to help. But when his typically Eddie message came on—“Breen residence, leave your number and don’t mumble!”—I hung up and went back to wandering. Should I call Aaron? No, we’d just argue about my getting involved with the investigation. And Lily had put herself firmly out of bounds. I was striking out right along with the Chicago batters.

  At last the Cubs went down to defeat, 10–0. That put the Series at two games to one against them, in a best-of-seven contest. They still had a chance to win the Series, of course, but you could see them losing heart as the game went on.

  Aaron was right, it would feel like hell to make it to the World Series for the first time in decades and then blow it. The pitiless TV cameras zoomed right into the losers’ dugout, lingering on their bleak eyes and tightly clamped lips. Poor bastards. I slumped on the couch in discouragement.

  Then I frowned at myself and hit the OFF button on my remote. Why on earth was I identifying so closely with a bunch of highly paid young strangers in Chicago? I had work to do here in Seattle.

  I tried Eddie again, with no luck. He was probably downtown playing pool, his most frequent nighttime activity beside going to cheesy blockbuster movies with me. I saw art films and ate sushi with Lily or Aaron, but Eddie and I watched car crashes and aliens while feeding our faces with candy-counter junk.

  Smiling at the thought, I opened the notebook again—and soon quit smiling. These squiggles and abbreviations could mean anything at all, there was no way to tell…Wait a minute. Of course there’s a way. I could take the notebook to my computer upstairs and compare Digger’s notes to his published columns. Why didn’t I think of that before?

  Outside the houseboat the evening air was cool and still and tasted like salt. I locked the front door carefully behind me, mindful of my possible failure to do so at the stadium the night of the murder. Just the word murder forming in my mind sent me tap-dancing fast up the outer steps, to pause on the landing and scan the dock nervously.

  The other houseboats were quiet, just a few windows alight. There was no one around except a solitary gray cat perched on Larry Halloway’s front windowsill. It made a humped-up silhouette against the flickering blue television glow. Then as I watched, it morphed into a long fluid shape that dropped to his deck and melted into the shadows.

  I slipped into the office and turned the deadbolt, annoyed to find myself breathing hard, my heartbeat fast and fluttery. Calm down. Whoever the murderer was, he couldn’t possibly know that I now had the notebook he’d been searching for.

  I thought it over. Clearly the killer must have called the stadium’s lost and found number just as Buck had done and gotten my name and address. Then he ransacked my home and followed me to NocNoc to search my van and finally my purse.

  But he’s given up on me by now, so calm down.

  Soon I had something to distract me from my anxiety: synchronizing Digger’s scribbles with his finished works was harder than I expected. I wasn’t sure how far back to go—the notebook pages weren’t dated—but finally I found an article that matched up with the first entries in the notebook.

  Eureka! That gave me a kind of translation key, and the scribblings made more and more sense as I riffled the pages, making my own notes as I sorted out Digger’s pattern of abbreviations. Nothing was written out in full except the occasional proper name for accurate spelling—not nicknames, but first, last, and even middle—and those became initials after the first mention.

  Gordon Jesus Gutierrez, for example, appeared early in the notebook with the “rr” circled, and only as GG after that. I noted that down and kept going. Crouched in the pool of light from my desk lamp, surrounded by the night-blackened windows of my office, I felt like a code breaker in some old war movie. All I needed was a big-shouldered dress and a date with Alec Guinness.

  As I flipped faster and faster through the little book, Digger’s secretive and malicious personality seemed to seep from the pages like a bad odor. I could feel his glee at documenting one player’s pattern of choking up, or uncovering a dirty personal secret about another.

  There were less inflammatory pieces as well, about team-hopping general managers and front office strategies. One of these threw me, until I realized that it didn’t correlate to the notebook at all. Apparently Digger could write about the voting process for the Baseball Hall of Fame off the top of his head, without notes.

  That piece was interesting to me, because I’d never understood who did the Hall of Fame voting. It’s professional baseball writers with at least ten years of experience, and a very picky group they are. Of the thousands of men who ever played in the majors, only two hundred or so have been enshrined in the sacred hall. In these times of proliferating awards and cheapened honors, I thought, this particular Hall of Fame was a true elite.

  But that didn’t get me any further in my search for suspects, so I went back to work. At last I reached the final half-dozen pages of the notebook, followed by the blank sheets that would never be filled. These pages didn’t correlate to anything that had yet been published, but I had developed enough of a glossary of Digger’s shorthand to try and ferret out their meaning.

  And perhaps a clue to the murder.

  GG showed up here a couple of times, s
o at first I wondered if this unwritten story was about Gordo’s wedding. But Rose—or Honeysuckle—wasn’t mentioned, nor was anything else wedding-related that I could decipher. Mostly there were dates and times and addresses, for interviews perhaps, and the names or initials of various other Navigators.

  LT was there without being spelled out, but that would be Leroy Theroux. “LT knows????” it said, each question mark bigger than the last. Knows what? I wondered. Theroux was the Navs general manager, so presumably he’d know just about everything that went on with the team. But what in particular?

  Another, rather odd name appeared for the first time, printed out in block letters: DECA DURABOLIN. That sounded eastern European, but I’d never heard of him. Or her? Deca might be female, but there weren’t many women of note in baseball. Of course I was hardly a walking baseball encyclopedia, so I ran a Google search on the name, carefully tapping in the odd spelling.

  The search results made me sit back in my chair to stare openmouthed at my own pale reflection in the window glass. Instead of citations to baseball articles, what appeared was a column of medical texts, with a sidebar of ads from sleazy-sounding mail-order pharmacies.

  Deca Durabolin wasn’t a person. It was a drug.

  I knew a little about the steroid scandal that had shaken major league baseball a few years back, with reverberations that reached all the way up to hearings in Congress. But I learned a lot more as I skimmed through one Web page after another.

  It was a sad and sordid tale. Muscle-pumping steroids like this Deca stuff had been banned from baseball, but not before tainting the record-breaking careers of several marquee players. Now anyone suspected of “juicing” himself with drugs was guilty till proven innocent, at least in the mind of the public.

  Violations of the ban carried heavy penalties in terms of suspension or even expulsion from the league. So if Digger had turned up evidence that someone on the Navigators was using—

  Wait a minute. Record-breaking?

  What about Gordo Gutierrez’s all-time home run record? That would be tainted, or maybe even disqualified, if it could be shown that he had used steroids. Not Gordo, I protested silently. Surely Digger wasn’t going after Gordo. But then I turned a page and saw it, heavily printed and underlined twice: “GG/DD??”

  I turned away from my computer, feeling queasy.

  “Something about bringing someone down,” Judy Duvall had said. Even the suspicion that Gordo’s home run performance was drug-enhanced would bring him down in a big way—and create a public relations catastrophe for the Navigators.

  But never mind the Navigators. What about Rose? I blew out a breath and raked my hands through my hair. The real catastrophe here would be for Rose. If Gordo was using illicit drugs—if Gordo was a murderer—what would that do to her?

  I’m usually fond of my brides, except for a few monsters of ego, but Rose McKinney had really gotten to me. The aching sense of loss from her mother’s death that she tried so hard to hide. Her discomfort with the badly fitting tough-girl persona that she put on as Honeysuckle Hell. And on top of that her extraordinary voice—Rose was a remarkable girl.

  And she trusted me, I could tell, though she wasn’t a girl who trusted easily. How would she feel if I destroyed the myth of her gentle and beloved Gordo?

  But maybe it isn’t a myth?

  I went over to the window, confronting my reflection, arguing with myself. Maybe Digger was just speculating, fishing for scandal, looking for mud to sling at the man who’d reached the pinnacle in a sport that had rejected him.

  I had only Digger’s suspicions to go on, after all. It wasn’t as if I’d seen Gordo searching my houseboat, or checking out my van when it was parked at—

  Parked.

  Suddenly I remembered something, and the thought of it gave me a cold shiver. Gordo had been standing near the door of NocNoc when I left, and he’d made some comment about parking.

  “It’s good that you parked close”—that was it. But how did he know where I’d parked? Had he been out to the van already, to break in and search for the notebook? Had he followed me out to grab my purse, had he been watching my houseboat—was he watching me now?

  “Stop it!” I said aloud. I was getting tied up in paranoid knots inside my own head. “Just stop it.”

  I sat down again and took some deep slow breaths. Was I getting carried away with all this? Quite a few athletes had been accused of steroid use in the recent past, and none of them had committed murder. Maybe I was blowing the idea way out of proportion.

  I thought about what to do next. OK, so Gordo was a possible suspect in Digger’s murder. Should I call Detective Starkey? No way, he’d never listen. What else, then? Find out more about Gordo and drugs, obviously. Ask someone with expertise, someone discreet who was outside the Navigators organization.

  Someone like Holly Crider! With a sigh of relief, I looked up the phone number of the downtown condo that she and her bridegroom had bought.

  “Hi, it’s Carnegie. Have you got a few minutes?”

  Holly sounded harried. “I don’t have one single minute, Carnegie. I’m on deadline, and I leave for Minneapolis tomorrow to cover games four and five. The cheap old Sentinel actually came up with some travel money, just for these two games. I’ll catch you when I get back.”

  “It’s kind of important, Holly. If I could just—”

  “Hang on, would you? I’ve got another call.”

  I waited.

  “That was my editor again, I’ve got to go.” Then she hesitated. “Really important?”

  “Really, really.”

  “All right, I can take a little time after my run in the morning before I head to the airport. Can you make it to the Market around seven?”

  “I’ll be there,” I told her. “Meet you at the pig.”

  Then I went straight downstairs and got into bed. But I didn’t sleep.

  Chapter Twenty

  Rachel the Pig is a life-size bronze sculpture, a piggybank for charity, and a landmark at the Pike Place Market. Instead of meeting someone “in that spice shop where we went that time,” or “by that stall where we got the great raspberries,” you just say “Meet you at the pig,” and there you are. Rachel stands squat and four-square at the crossroads of the main market buildings, smiling her piggy smile, and she’s unmissable.

  Holly Crider was already hanging around Rachel when I arrived. She wore running clothes, and despite the morning chill her cropped dark hair was damp with sweat.

  “Mind if we walk?” she said, still breathing hard. “I need to cool down some before I head for the airport.”

  There was no shortage of walking space. The market covers nine acres of sloping land between First Avenue and the waterfront, with a subterranean maze of shops and stairways underneath. We passed Pike Place Fish, where they sling whole salmon through the air to fill your order, and headed down the wide aisle of tables devoted to fresh produce.

  Most of the craft and curio shops would be shuttered for a while yet, but the cobblestones of Pike Place were rumbling with trucks and bustling with deliverymen as the farmers and flower vendors began to set out their wares. Their brisk instructions and friendly greetings filled the air, along with the aroma of coffee poured from Thermoses and hot cinnamon rolls from the cafés across the street.

  Holly walked quickly, so I matched her long stride with my own. Or tried to—her cool-down was practically a workout for me.

  “So what’s up?” she said as we strode past gleaming ranks of apples and tumbles of golden squash and sheaves of chrysanthemums and strawflowers. “What’s really, really important?”

  Now that the moment had come, I wasn’t quite sure how to frame my question.

  “I, um, need to ask you something. But strictly in confidence.”

  She glanced at her watch and kept striding. “Shoot.”

  A squeaky-wheeled dolly stacked with fruit crates came rolling toward us, pushed by a grinning woman in coveralls, and I had to wa
it as Holly and I dodged to either side of it. Once we reunited, I took the plunge.

  “Have you ever heard anything about Gordo Gutierrez using steroids?”

  It was as though I’d suddenly caught on fire. Holly stopped and stared at me, her mouth open and her eyes wide.

  “Holy heaven, Carnegie, don’t say that kind of thing in public!”

  She grabbed my elbow and steered me out of the building, across Western Avenue, and onto grassy little Victor Steinbrueck Park, named for the architect who helped save the market from demolition back in the 1960s. There were only a few people around, and the traffic roar from the Alaskan Way Viaduct below us guaranteed that they couldn’t eavesdrop.

  “The answer is no,” Holly told me, her voice low and urgent. “And the question is, what on earth made you ask?”

  “Strictly in confidence?” I said again. “I mean completely strictly, Holly. No notes, no follow-up queries to other people. Not one word to anyone.”

  She hesitated, her dark brows drawn together and her lower lip caught in her teeth. But the hesitation didn’t cause me to doubt her. On the contrary, Holly Crider was taking her time and making a serious decision.

  She stared unseeing at the view, which was well worth seeing. The October morning mist had begun to disperse over Elliott Bay, unveiling the snowy Olympics on the western horizon. To the south, beyond the viaduct and the arch of Yesler Field’s retractable roof, the grand blue-white pyramid of Mount Rainier was taking shape. I admired it while I waited.

  “OK,” said Holly at last, with a sharp resolute nod of her head. “For you, not one word to anyone. Now tell me what’s going on.”

  I told her, as briefly as I could, about my search for Digger’s killer. I almost brought out the notebook to show her—it was zipped securely into my purse, with the strap securely slung across my chest—but somehow I didn’t want to be seen in public with it. You never knew who was watching.

  Holly listened to my tale without interruption—and without advising me to let the police handle it.