Died to match Page 0,13

stellar view of the lake. Eddie rarely met with the clients—he objected to marriage, and therefore to weddings, or so he claimed—but this morning he stood in the good room pouring coffee for Lieutenant Graham and a dimpled young Asian-American woman in police uniform, who sat stiffly with a notebook on her lap.

Eddie Breen and my father had been inseparable, back in their hell-raising merchant marine days. He’s little and leathery, with fine white hair, a limited but immaculate wardrobe, and a tetchy disposition. Eddie keeps my books and negotiates my vendor contracts and bosses me around, and I let him, I guess, because Dad’s no longer alive to do it. He looked me over as I came in, his steel-gray eyes on high beam.

“Carnegie! Sit down before you fall down. Have some coffee. You look like ten miles of bad road.”

Coming from Eddie, this was a wealth of tender solicitude. I accepted a cup and sat across from Graham, who wore a jacket and tie, with wingtips nicely polished and crinkly brown hair neatly combed. He looked like a well-groomed, disappointed man who’d been up all night. After introducing Officer Lee, he turned to Eddie.

“Thank you, Mr. Breen,” he said, in polite but positive dismissal. “You’ve been very helpful.”

Eddie rose. “I’ll get back to answering the phone, then. Carnegie, I’ve been saying ‘No comment’ to everybody. That OK?”

“Perfect. If you need to, just put it on the answering machine and let it ring.”

He nodded and turned back to Graham. “Don’t go getting her all upset. She’s got work to do.”

Officer Lee smiled to herself, but Graham just nodded solemnly as my fire-breathing champion left us. I barely waited for the workroom door to close before I demanded, “Lieutenant, have you talked to Tommy? Did he recognize the murderer? Who was it?”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” said Graham, as if I hadn’t spoken. “What time did you arrive at the Aquarium last night?”

“What does it matter what time I arrived! What did Tommy say?”

“Ms. Kincaid,” he said quietly. “This is not a conversation. It’s a witness interview in a homicide investigation. Please cooperate.”

So I did. Graham asked me about my relationship with Mercedes, and if I knew of anyone who might have wanted to harm her. Then he had me reconstruct the events of the party, hour by hour. He unfolded a visitor’s map of the Aquarium on the glass-topped table that usually holds bridal magazines and photographers’ portfolios, and I traced my movements on it, with approximate times. Marvin reported closing off the shorebird corridor at about eleven P.M., which jibed with my recollection of when I’d radioed my request to him.

“So Mercedes must have been killed after eleven?” I speculated. But I got no response from Graham. “The corridor would have been too public before then. Either she crossed the rope barrier with someone else, or she went alone and the murderer followed her. Don’t you think?”

Still no response, except for more of his steady, methodical questions. “You say that Ms. Montoya invited Sydney Soper to dance with her. Did she remain with him for the rest of the evening?”

“I have no idea, Lieutenant. I spoke with her briefly just before I radioed Marvin to close off Northwest Shores, and I don’t think I saw her at all after that. Or him either. But that doesn’t mean they were together.”

“What exactly did you do between eleven o’clock and the time you discovered the body?”

I described my circuit through the party, my dance with Zack, the people I recalled seeing on the dance floor, and then meeting Aaron on the stairs and going out on the pier with him. All the while, Officer Lee scribbled away. Graham seemed unsurprised by Corinne’s fall into the harbor; maybe it happened all the time at waterfront parties. I continued on, explaining about my final walk-through routine, and mentioning Aaron’s departure. This time I managed to describe the corpse without tears.

I thought we were finally finished, but instead, the detective began to skip around in the chronology of the party, repeating questions he’d already asked, probing at my memory like a man with a poker stirring at a fire. It’s surprising what you can remember if someone asks the right way. Graham coaxed out details I hadn’t even registered at the time, like the triangular gap in the rocks near Mercedes’ shoulder—the source of the murder weapon, I surmised, though he wouldn’t say—and the damp patch of drool on Tommy’s leprechaun jacket.

“Would you