To Love and To Perish (3 page)

I turned to find Detective Mike Reese, a dark-haired cop who had a knack for turning up when things weren't going so great for me. I could never be sure whether the fear of being arrested or his good looks made my heart race. “Why am I not surprised you're here?”

He managed a weak grin. “I was going to say the exactly same thing. We need to talk about the death of Carolyn Crabbe.”

“I swear I wasn't anywhere near the victim—” I began my protest.

Reese held up his hands. “Whoa. I know you weren't near the murder scene. We've already had several witnesses place you in the lobby before you found the body.”

Richard pushed me out of the way and held his arms straight out in front of him. “Arrest me. Lock me up. Let the justice system have its way with me. Just get this creature off my leg.”

Reese dropped his eyes to the tiny blond flower
girl who now sat sucking her thumb on Richard's shoe with one arm wrapped around his leg. The edges of his mouth quivered as he obviously strained to keep his composure. “We might need the jaws of life,” he said, his eyes flashing with merriment.

Richard didn't smile, and I knew that I would be risking bodily harm if I laughed.

“We need to entice her with something,” I said, glancing around me. Where had I left my emergency kit? I saw Fern shoo the last flower girl through the doors, and I mouthed a silent
Thank you
to him as I rushed around to help Lucille with the bride. I heard a loud fanfare as the bride started her walk down the aisle, Lucille following her into the ballroom, fluffing her train the whole way.

Richard pulled his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket and produced a stack of bills. “How about a twenty?”

Reese raised an eyebrow at him. “I don't think so.”

“Well, I'm not giving her a fifty. That's extortion.”

“I didn't mean to entice her with cash,” I said. “She's a child, for crying out loud. We need to find some candy or something.”

Richard replaced his wallet with a sniff. “Would have worked when I was a child.”

“You were a child?” Fern asked as he joined us and gave Richard the once-over. “Hard to imagine.”

Richard folded his arms in front of him. “I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that.”

“How about a stick of gum?” Reese produced a slightly weathered piece from the pocket of his black wool blazer.

“It's worth a shot.” I took the gum and bent down to the flower girl's level. “If you let go of the nice man, you can have this piece of gum.”

She seemed to weigh her options for a moment, then nodded and simultaneously let go of Richard's leg and snatched the gum out of my fingers.

“Thank God,” Richard sighed as the girl toddled off down the aisle after the bride.

“And she even made it down the aisle.” I pointed as the errant flower girl reached the end of the aisle behind the bride, took a seat on the bride's train, and proceeded to unwrap her gum. The audience began to laugh. “Sort of.”

Fern put an arm around my shoulders. “With ten flower girls, anything short of a citywide riot is a victory.”

Kate slipped out of the ballroom and pulled the door closed behind her. “Not bad if I do say so myself.” She caught sight of Reese and rolled her shoulders back. “Well, hello again.”

Reese made a point to avert his eyes from her cleavage. An admirable feat considering Kate's dramatically low-cut dress.

“I'm glad you're all here,” he said. “I need to ask you a few questions about Carolyn Crabbe.”

“This won't take too long, will it?” I glanced nervously around the lobby. “Our bride still doesn't know that her wedding won't be happening and she's around here somewhere taking pictures.”

“Don't worry.” Kate pointed to her wedding
schedule. “She left to do photos at the monuments with Maxwell, remember? She won't be back for another thirty minutes at least.”

I let out a long breath. It had slipped my mind in all the frenzy that the bride wanted photos with her bridesmaids in front of the Jefferson Memorial. Usually the Jefferson was a hot spot for photos in the spring when the cherry blossoms were in season, but this bride had insisted on photos there even though the trees were bare and it was close to freezing. More proof that brides could not be thwarted by logic or sanity.

“Let's go in the ballroom.” Reese motioned for us to follow him across the hall, where the police had already put up swags of yellow crime scene tape. “I need for you to explain how things were before the crime scene was tampered with.”

I swallowed hard as we entered the ballroom again and averted my eyes from the stage where officers now gathered around Carolyn's body. “She hung above the stage.”

Reese nodded. “We figured that from where she landed.”

“I told that banquet captain not to mess with the body, Detective,” Richard said. “But he refused to listen to me.”

Reese shook his head and frowned. “We have some officers questioning him right now. When we arrived we found him trying to drag the body off the stage. He may be facing some charges.”

Kate shuddered. “He touched the corpse? Isn't it hard to move bodies once they've gone into rigor mortis?”

I looked at Kate in amazement and wondered
if she'd been watching
CSI
marathons again.

Reese looked impressed, too. “It might be hard to move the body if she'd been dead for very long, but the time of death was probably only minutes before you saw her.”

I felt a chill go through my body. “You mean she'd just died when we walked in?”

Reese gave a curt nod of his head. “She was barely blue when we got here.”

“Pretty,” Richard muttered.

Reese rested his gaze on me. “Can you tell me anything else about what the victim looked like when you saw her?”

“It looked like she'd been hung by a bride's veil or at least the fabric used to make them,” I said. “I didn't get a good look at her because she faced the other way most of the time.”

“Until Richard and Giancarlo started fighting over the body and then she started spinning,” Kate added, leaning in close to Reese and putting her hand on his arm. “So we only got glimpses of her face as it went around and around.”

Richard glared at Kate, but she seemed totally oblivious. I started to kick her and then stopped myself. I suppose I couldn't be upset if she made a play for Reese. It wasn't like I'd ever dated him. Anyway, I'd started seeing someone. Well, I don't know if I could actually call it dating yet. But Ian, the Scottish bandleader I'd met at a wedding a couple of months ago, and I were definitely more than friends. At least I thought so.

“And that's it?” Reese asked, snapping me out of my introspection.

“As far as I can remember,” I said. “Does it look like suicide or foul play?”

“Suicide?” Reese almost laughed. “Not likely.”

“I told you, Annabelle,” Richard said. “Carolyn wouldn't kill herself in the middle of a wedding.”

“We found evidence that she didn't go down without a fight,” Reese said.

“You're kidding.” I shivered as I imagined Carolyn struggling with a killer.

“You're sure it isn't from Richard's fight with Giancarlo?” Kate asked, and got another dirty look from Richard.

“I'm afraid not.” Reese closed his notebook and dropped it in his jacket pocket. “We found wood under her fingernails from the balcony railing and marks from where she tried to keep from being pushed over the edge.”

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Someone had hated Carolyn Crabbe enough to drag her over the edge of the balcony, and we'd only missed walking in on it by minutes.

“Well, I know what I'm getting,” Kate said as we settled into a banquette at Bistro Français.

Even though it was late at night, the French bistro buzzed with activity. Waiters wearing long white aprons scuttled around the two-level mahogany and brass dining room that was almost filled to capacity. Lately it had become a habit for Kate to drag me here after we finished our Saturday wedding. She had a thing for their quiche.

“I've never been here.” Fern looked around him at the stylishly dressed twenty-somethings taking a break from their late night revelry in Georgetown. “What's good?”

I picked up the menu and flipped it open. “Kate always gets the quiche Lorraine, but their fries are to die for.”

“And you must try their hot chocolate,” Kate added, pushing her closed menu away from her.

I let my hair down and shook it out. It had been pinned up for so long that it actually hurt.

Fern pressed a hand to his chest and sighed. “I love it when you let your hair down. You really should wear it that way more often.”

“Thanks, Fern.” I managed a weary smile. “I'm afraid I can't stand it getting in my face when I work, though.”

Fern reached over and squeezed my hand. “But ponytails are not sexy, doll. Not the way you wear them, at least.”

It would be pointless to explain to Fern that I wasn't trying to be sexy when I coordinated weddings. He and Kate came from the same school of thought: that you should always be ready to meet the man of your dreams. I found the whole concept exhausting.

Richard slumped down in the leather bench next to me. “I can't believe it's finally over. I thought we'd never get out of there.”

“I still say it was awfully nice of the hotel to clear out the restaurant for us to use for the wedding.” Kate slipped off her suit jacket and leaned back in her chair. “They never close down the restaurant for a private event.”

I rubbed my arms to warm up and wondered how Kate didn't freeze without her jacket on. Especially considering the sleeveless dress she had on underneath. “Well, they've never had a murder in their hotel and a banquet captain who got hauled away for obstruction of justice.”

Fern winked at me. “Touché.”

“The bride seemed to take it all pretty well,” Kate said. “She didn't even seem to notice that the bowl of honey ended up being a lot smaller than it should have been.”

“It was practically a thimble,” Fern said.

“She should be grateful that we emptied five hundred individual honey packets from the room service pantry for her,” Richard grumbled. “It felt like I was stuck in a bad episode of
I Love Lucy
.”

Fern shook his head. “Who would have guessed how many of those little packs it takes to fill a bowl?”

“The bride will never know that we had to replace the first bowl of honey because a dead woman landed in it, will she, Richard?” I said with a hint of warning in my voice.

“You wound me, Annabelle. You know I wouldn't repeat something like that,” he said. “A good magician never reveals his tricks.”

A waiter filled our water glasses and dropped a basket of warm bread in the center of the table. My stomach growled. I hadn't eaten a bite since I'd wolfed down half of a cinnamon scone early that morning. Luckily, I'd been too busy dealing with one wedding catastrophe after another to notice, but suddenly I was starving.

I ripped off a hot, crusty piece of bread and popped it in my mouth. “I hope the word doesn't get out about what happened. You know how these things are for business.”

“I think it's safe to say everyone in town will know about it by morning,” Richard said.

I put my head in my hands. “That's what I'm afraid of.”

“Listen, Annie.” Kate reached across the table and patted my shoulder. “You need to relax. Have you used those five weirdos that Richard gave you?”

I looked up at her. “Excuse me?”

“You know. The Guatemalan weirdos that Richard got you to help you with stress.”

I almost laughed. “Do you mean the
worry dolls
?” Richard had gotten me a set of tiny worry dolls from Guatemala to place under my pillow and supposedly rid me of stress. He swore by the power of voodoo dolls, but I found them too creepy to have lying around, so he said that the worry dolls were the next best thing.

“That's what they are? I thought you guys called them weirdos.” Kate reached for a piece of bread. “You have to admit, they kind of look like weirdos.”

“What did I do to deserve this?” Richard muttered under his breath.

“We could call ourselves the Five Weirdos if we had one more person,” Fern said.

“Leatrice would definitely qualify,” Kate said, suggesting my elderly neighbor who had a fondness for off-beat clothing that made noise, covert surveillance of other neighbors in the building that bordered on stalking, and meddling in my personal life.

Fern bobbed his head. “She would make a great weirdo.”

Kate nudged Fern with her elbow. “We could get special jackets made up. Leatrice would love that.”

“Over my dead body.” Richard folded his arms tightly in front of his chest, and Kate and Fern collapsed into fits of laughter.

“They're teasing you, Richard,” I said, fighting the urge to laugh myself.

“You are both horrible people.” Richard sat up very straight and turned so he faced away from Kate and Fern.

“Okay, you two.” I tried to sound serious. “We really shouldn't be joking around. A woman died tonight.”

Kate's face fell. “You're right. Poor Carolyn. What a way to go.”

“I didn't really know her,” I said. “But she was famous in the wedding industry so I knew about her.”

Fern leaned over the table. “Famous and infamous.”

“Meaning?” Kate nudged him. “Come on, Fern. You can't leave us hanging like that.”

“When you've been planning weddings in this town as long as Carolyn Crabbe has, you make a few enemies along the way, that's all. Everyone knows that she wasn't the easiest person to work for or with.”

“I can attest to the fact that she wasn't the friendliest person on the job,” I said. “It's the first time another wedding planner has threatened me like that.”

“To your face.” Richard busily buttered a piece of bread.

I raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you saying? That people are saying things about me behind my back?”

“Of course. If you're any good in the business someone is always trying to knock you down. Carolyn had just earned her chops enough to say it to people's faces. Don't think the other planners in town aren't just as ruthless.”

“Ruthless enough to kill?” I asked.

“What?” Kate said loudly, and then lowered her voice. “You think one of her competitors killed her?”

“Who else?” I said. “Unless one of her brides got really ticked off at her. Why go to the trouble of hanging her with a veil if you aren't trying to make a point?”

“Great,” Kate sighed. “So that narrows the list of possible murderers.”

“Yep.” I leaned back and let out a long breath. “To all of our colleagues.”