May the Best Man Die

by Deborah Donnelly

  “Not quite.” His deep blue gaze flickered toward me, then focused burningly on Mandy again. I expected to see a smoky little spot appear between her eyes, like a dry leaf under a magnifying glass. “There is no Beau's Girl in Seattle. Not yet. But I think your city is ready for the Paliere touch!”

  Mandy, what a surprise, wanted to hear all about “the Touch,” and Beau went on to extol his particular kind of wedding—the ones I call, in private, Best Performance in a Nuptial Drama. The magazines were full of them these days: the vast budget, the extravagant stage set, and the bride jeweled and gowned as if to accept an Oscar.

  “It's her big moment,” said Beau, gazing into Mandy's big brown eyes, and then into the camera's small red one. “Her one chance to be a superstar. Everything must be perfect.”

  “But perfection isn't really the point, is it?” I interrupted, thoroughly exasperated by now. I was rapidly departing from Monsieur Paliere's magnetic field.

  “But of course it is the point!” he said winningly. “‘Beauty and perfection in every detail.' It is my personal mantra.”

  I remained un-won. “I have to disagree. Surely the point is to have a meaningful ceremony, and then a fun reception that matches your own personal style. If you bankrupt yourself just to imitate the celebrities, and treat your guests like a studio audience—”

  “Of course,” said Beau, in a tone of deep Gallic condolence. “If you are doing budget weddings, Car-nay-gie, then you cannot attempt the glorious gesture, the really magnificent mise-en-scène. But what a shame for the bride to lose her one opportunity to shine, merely to save a few dollairs.”

  “That's not what I meant!” I protested, leaning forward, quite sure by now that my face was flaming scarlet.

  That was when the damn microphone dropped in the damn carnations, and things went downhill—steeply—after that. The camera cut to a video of Beau's recent triumphs while Doug rewired me, but he might have saved himself the trouble. I spent the rest of the segment failing to get a coherent word in edgewise. They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but this was an utter fiasco.

  At least the fiasco kept me from brooding about Aaron for a little while—though I managed to do a certain amount of that anyway as I drove back to Lily's.

  I could have gone straight to work, but I wanted to scrub off all the makeup and change into something that felt more like me, or at least something loud and complicated and unphotogenic. And maybe look at Lily's videotape in private, with the faint hope that what felt like an endless, humiliating ordeal was merely an awkward, forgettable few minutes. Not much chance of that, I thought darkly as I parked the van.

  Not much privacy, either: Lily's Volvo was still at the house, wedged into the narrow little driveway between its concrete retaining walls—a paint-scraping specialty of old Seattle neighborhoods. Oddly, the front door was ajar. I ran up the steps and pushed it open.

  “Hello? I thought you'd be at work by now. Did I look as bad as I—Lily, what's wrong?”

  She was sitting at her kitchen table, by the window overlooking her tiny backyard, with a cup of untouched coffee and an open phone book in front of her. She looked up eagerly when I entered, but when she saw it was me, the disappointment on her face was almost comical.

  Almost. I know Lily's expressions like my own, and I could tell this was bad. Maybe the worst.

  “Oh, God, is it one of the boys? Or Mike? What happened?”

  “The boys are fine,” she said, and forced a teary smile. “Mike, too. He took them to day care and school for me. He's wonderful, isn't he?”

  “He's the best.” I sat across from her. “Now, what happened?”

  “It's Dar,” she said, and her voice broke on the name. “He left a message during the night. I could hardly understand it. He was, he was . . .”

  “He'd been drinking,” I said gently, and put a handkerchief into her hand.

  “He was drunk!” Lily wiped her bloodshot eyes and took a long, determined breath, taking up a burden she thought was off her shoulders for good. “Carnegie, it was just like before. He was high and excited, talking about the bachelor party, and then he crashed and said how sorry he was to disappoint me again, and then he got angry at himself and started shouting. He just went on and on till the tape ran out. I was so angry, I erased it! But what if he's in trouble? What if he crashes his car? That could be the last time I ever hear his voice, and I erased it . . .”

  She dropped her head and sobbed like a child, and I knelt on the floor by her chair, to hold her.

  “I raised that boy,” she said against my shoulder. “My parents worked so hard and so long, and I raised Dar like he was my son instead of my brother. If that was the last time—”

  “It won't be the last time, Lily, I'm sure it won't. Darwin's probably home asleep.”

  “No, he's not! I talked to his roommate, he hasn't been home! I called his office and his friends—the ones I know about—and now Mike's checking on accidents.”

  On the mention of his name, Lieutenant Michael Graham let himself in at the front door. This time Lily and I both looked up eagerly, but Mike shook his head. He had crinkly dark brown hair and a gently somber expression, which had deepened now to pained sympathy.

  “No word.”

  Lily fled to the bathroom, to pull herself together, and Mike joined me in the kitchen.

  “She told you?”

  “Yes. Listen, I have a meeting in a few minutes, but I could cancel—”

  “Thanks, Carnegie, but for once, it's my day off.” He poured Lily's cold coffee down the drain, and began to make a fresh pot, moving about the kitchen with quiet competence.

  He knows the place as well as I do, I found myself thinking, and was somehow disconcerted by the thought. Disconcerted, too, by how natural it seemed to take my cue from Mike, instead of vice versa. “Should I wait here till she's dressed?”

  “No, go ahead to your meeting. I'll let you know what happens, I promise.”

  Then he patted my shoulder—in lieu of a hug, I think, since we weren't quite on hugging terms yet—and walked me to the door. I was halfway to Fremont before I remembered about my videotape.

  Well, better to forget the TV debacle and Aaron both, I decided, and even Darwin's troubles. I had to concentrate instead on my breakfast date with the mother of the bride. Thank heaven she was one of the good ones. In fact, the only thing making the insufferable Sally's wedding at all sufferable was the chance to work with her mother, the one and only Ivy Tyler.

  Chapter Six

  YES, I MEAN THAT IVY TYLER, THE VISIONARY CEO, THE WOMAN who got rich and famous by staking out the corner of Espresso and Motherhood. Meet for Coffee, Inc., also known as MFC, was her brainchild: a totally kid-friendly company, with baskets of toys, easy-listening music, and child-safe furniture in every café. And there were more MFC cafés springing up by the week.

  I'd read the rags-to-riches story a couple of times: young Ivy, abandoned by the teenaged father of her baby, started out in the ranks of the working poor. She had struggled to pay the bills and tend her pretty little daughter, and vowed that one day she'd change things for women in the same harsh and lonely straits.

  Change things she had, in her own unique way. Today, MFC boasted a loyal workforce of part-timer parents who got a day-care benefit along with their health and dental. Turnover was low and morale was high, and many of those moms and dads brought their offspring to work, giving each café a homey atmosphere, like one big community kitchen table.

  And thousands of customers were happy to pull up a chair. For adults-only business meetings, you went to Starbucks, or one of the many independent coffeehouses. To chat with your neighbor—or your work-from-home broker—without the use of baby-sitters, you packed up the kids and went to MFC.

  Ivy turned out to have a knack for picking the right man for the right job; her brilliant chief of operations, Simon Weeks, was a case in point. In a few short years, Meet for Coffee had become one of those “why didn't some
body think of it sooner?” business triumphs. Ivy and Simon showed up together on the covers of Forbes and Fortune; by herself, Ivy was featured in Oprah Magazine and Family Circle. And along the way, the company's stock price climbed like a rocket, showering sparks of wealth on all concerned, with no descent in sight.

  Happily for me, Ivy was lavishing some of her well-gotten gains on her daughter's wedding. She had married a second time, to an eminent conductor, but he was retired and reclusive. Ivy was the one writing the checks. Although mother and daughter were prickly with each other, those early years of deprivation had left their residue of guilt, and now whatever Sally wanted, Sally got. This indulgence might be spoiling the girl's character, but it was helping my bank balance no end.

  This morning, Ivy and her checkbook were meeting me in Fremont, to talk menus with Joe. The early-morning quiet was beginning to buzz with rush hour, but I found a spot not too far from Solveto's. Looking around, I saw the mother of the bride right across the street, climbing out of a nifty scarlet gas-electric hybrid with a license plate that read MFC ONE.

  Ivy was a middle-aged, dark-eyed blonde like her daughter, not slim, but reasonably trim, and beautifully groomed in a no-nonsense way. This morning her cropped silver-blonde hair was set off by a severely elegant black wool coat and a scarf, scarlet as well, whose fringes fluttered as she strode briskly toward me. Ivy did everything briskly.

  “Carnegie!” she called through the clear, chilly air. The cloud cover had dissolved; no snow today. Ivy jaywalked toward me, smiling and then making a face. “I saw the interview!”

  I groaned as she reached me. “You were up that early?”

  “No choice.” She yawned, showing nicely capped teeth in front and a mouthful of silver fillings in back. “I took the red-eye up from San Francisco. Those people really know how to brew coffee! I recognized you on the TV at the gate, and stayed to watch.”

  “So tell me, how bad was it?”

  “Honey, you got screwed in public.”

  “That's what I thought.” I pointed up the block at Fremont's MFC. “Shall we go drown my sorrows in some coffee? We've got time before we see Joe.”

  She gave a quick bark of laughter. “Are you joking, with all those rugrats underfoot? Come on, there's a Starbucks around the corner. I'll pretend it's market research.”

  Soon we had a table for two, and I was telling Ivy my troubles—the professional ones, not the personal. If Aaron Gold was writing a book about her company, I might run into him in Ivy's presence, and I wanted our unfortunate history strictly out of the picture. I just wished I could discipline my emotions as easily as I curbed my tongue.

  “What did I ever do to Beau Paliere?” I whined. “I was just trying to be sensible about real-world weddings, but he made me sound like some cut-rate Las Vegas Wedding-O-Rama.”

  Ivy looked at me narrowly over the rim of her quad Americano, no room for cream. If I absorbed that much caffeine all at once, I'd be vibrating for weeks.

  “Don't you see his strategy?” she asked. “It wasn't you personally. He just needed a Brand X.”

  “Huh?”

  “Obviously, Paliere is planning to expand into the Pacific Northwest market. It's less sophisticated than New York or L.A., so he knows there's going to be price resistance, and he knows there's going to be customer loyalty to the local vendors like yourself. With Dorothy Fenner out of the picture, you could become a major competitor. So he positions you as a penny-pincher, and he plants the idea that less-expensive weddings are second-rate and unromantic. One stone, two dead birds.”

  Ivy went back to sipping her jet fuel, and I sat back and sighed. “So what can I do about it?”

  “You've got three options,” she said, counting them out on the palm of one hand with the neatly-manicured fingers of the other. Ivy had large hands for a woman, and wore no jewelry save for a narrow wedding band in white gold. “Number one is to ignore him, which believe me, you don't want to do. You'd be playing catch-up for the rest of your career.”

  “And the other two?” This woman was leagues beyond me in the business world, but she treated me like a fellow entrepreneur. It was flattering, and even better, energizing.

  “Simple,” she said. “Either you fight him on his own ground, and probably lose, or you position yourself as an appealing alternative to his shallow, flashy, spendthrift approach. Tell me, what's your mission statement?”

  “Well . . .” Keeping my head above water sounded so lame. “Well, my business card says I do elegant weddings with an original flair.”

  “Not bad. But elegant in what way? Original on a budget, or original expensive? How do you distinguish yourself from the competition? If you really want to succeed, you need a brand.”

  “Like MFC?”

  “Exactly.” Ivy smiled, a genuine smile that was worlds away from the well-rehearsed verve of TV personalities. Here were crow's-feet not yet Botoxed into blankness, and eyes that looked deep into yours. “You might think they're apples and oranges, MFC and Made in Heaven, but no matter what your product, brand identity is crucial.”

  She pulled out a sleek little PDA—I still use a notebook myself—and stabbed at it with a stylus. A platinum stylus, I might add, with a tiny diamond set into the top.

  “Let me have you meet with someone on my staff, Madison Jaffee. Is Wednesday morning OK?” Stab, stab. “Maddie's a whiz kid, she can walk you through the whole branding process.” A final stab, then she put the gadget away. “Meanwhile, I need your help with something.”

  “The rehearsal dinner—?”

  “No, it's not about the wedding.” She reached for her coat. “But let's not talk about it here, of all places.”

  She hurried me back toward Solveto's, only to halt in the entranceway of the building. I was eager to get inside, out of the cold, but a major client is a major client.

  “This is strictly confidential, Carnegie. Understood?” Ivy waited for my nod, then continued. “You've heard of Habitat Coffee?”

  “Sure.” Habitat was a small roaster just north of Seattle, which specialized in shade-grown coffee from Mexico.

  The idea, as I understood it, was that clear-cutting forest to make way for coffee was taking a toll on bird populations. Shade-grown equals bird-friendly. As more people got the idea, Habitat's red-feather logo was showing up in independent cafés around Seattle and beyond. I'd even seen displays of Habitat coffee beans on my last visit to my mother in Boise. And that's Boise, Idaho.

  “You don't hold stock, do you?” I shook my head, and Ivy lowered her voice even further. “Good. I don't want any nonsense about insider trading. You see, we're working on an acquisition of Habitat. We plan to announce it after the first of the year, and I want to do a big reception and press conference about it. Welcome the new employees to the MFC fold, celebrate our dynamic partnership, yadda yadda yadda. Basically a good, upbeat photo op for next year's annual report, and a couple of inches in the Wall Street Journal.”

  “And you want me to coordinate the event?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I'd be delighted.” It wasn't a wedding, but my calendar for the new year was disturbingly empty. And I was more than happy to go the extra mile for Ivy Tyler. “Where shall we start?”

  “First off,” she said, nodding her approval and cutting to the chase, “I need you to go up to the Habitat facility in Snohomish, ASAP, and tell me if the roasting plant itself will work as a venue or if we have to find someplace else. Simon will be upgrading the whole operation soon, he says their fire protection's bad and their security is worse.”

  “That's Simon Weeks?”

  She smiled warmly. “Yeah. Simon's my go-to guy. If he says tear the place up, we tear it up. But I don't want to start yet, if we can use the plant for a reception first. So, can you fit in a scouting trip?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Snohomish is what, an hour's drive north? That shouldn't be a problem. Let's go upstairs and check my calendar.”

  On the way up, I b
egan to comment on last night's bachelor party, but Ivy frowned and shifted her stance at the mention of Jason Kraye. Aha, I thought, preening a little at my skill with body language. She doesn't like him, either. I wonder what she really thinks of Frank Sanjek? Frank must seem a little watered-down for a quadruple-shotter like Ivy.

  “Say, I've been meaning to ask the party expert,” she said now, rather awkwardly changing the subject. “Why do my guests always congregate in the kitchen? At my Christmas cocktail party for the managers, I put the food in another room, I even put the booze in another room, along with a neighbor dressed as Santa, but still, everyone jammed in by the sink and the stove.”

  I laughed. “I've got a theory about that. Kincaid's Law of Leaning.”

  “Leaning?”

  “Yes. Have you ever sat down at a party, and then some tedious bore sits next to you and you're trapped on the couch for hours?”

  “Have I ever!”

  “We all have,” I said, as we entered my little office on the second floor. I waved at Kelli, the pink and plump receptionist, on the way. Joe had a nice staff. “Most people stay on their feet at parties, so they can circulate. But standing gets uncomfortable after a while, so they gravitate toward something to lean on. And kitchen counters are exactly the right height for leaning. That's my theory, anyway.”

  Ivy raised her eyebrows. “Good theory. You know, I could use someone like you as an undercover shopper, to scope out customer behavior and report back. If you ever get tired of brides, you let me know.”

  I didn't mention how tired I was of Ivy's daughter. Instead, I cleared some time to visit Habitat the next day, and asked for contact information.

  “Talk to Kevin Bauer,” said Ivy, jotting down a number. “He founded the company, and he's still pretty hands-on, so he can show you around personally. If you talk with anyone besides Kevin, it's strictly a casual visit. No mention of MFC. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good. Now point me to the ladies' room before we get to work with Joe.”