Killer Market

8

« ^ » “Household furniture, of a rude description, dates back to the time when men began to build houses to live in.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

I couldn’t have been asleep more than five minutes when I heard a pleasant, if annoyingly persistent, voice in my ear, a masculine voice that told me that this was Friday and that I was listening to National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. To my utter disbelief Bob Edwards also told me that it was fifteen minutes past the hour. Groggily, I checked the digital numbers on the clock radio beside the bed and saw that the hour in question was seven a.m.

I didn’t remember setting the alarm, but the radio was a model so like my own that I must have automatically flipped the switch. Sheer dumb luck that it was set for seven-fifteen. Otherwise, I’d have slept till noon. Even though I only had one custody case scheduled for ten o’clock, missing it would not endear me to the Guilford County Clerk of Court.

My head throbbed, my eyeballs felt as if they’d been dipped in sand, and it took a conscious act of will to push my stiff and aching body off the lumpy mattress and stagger to the bathroom when every muscle whimpered for another five hours’ sleep.

Ten minutes under a hot, pulsating shower head washed away some of the sand and part of the headache. Another ten minutes of stretching exercises got rid of most of the kinks in my body. The kinks in my wet hair were another matter. I toweled it dry, gave it an inadequate finger comb and put back on the clothes I’d worn last night.

There was moisturizer in the bathroom but no lipstick and I looked like Death’s grandmother.

Morning sunlight streamed through Pell Austin’s front windows when I stepped out into the hallway and I did a startled double take as I came nose to nose with a wall full of faces from floor to ceiling. Some were animal, some human, some other-worldly, but all were carved in realistic detail from various dark woods and they peered out through a trompe l’oeil jungle that was part painted background and part three-dimensional vines covered with green silk leaves.

Through the open archway was a living room far removed from anything I’d ever seen in Colleton County. Or in New York City, for that matter. The jungle motif continued in the dark green walls and leafy prints on the loveseat and chaise.

Pride of place, though, went to a life-size stuffed lion who stood frozen in mid-pace in front of the windows. Instead of a swag of drapery fabric, a well-preserved boa constrictor was looped over a hunting spear that acted as curtain rod. The snake’s head curved upward and seemed to have its eyes fixed on a porcelain monkey that gibbered from the top of a decoupaged chest, but I couldn’t be sure since it was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses.

The end tables came in the guise of two life-size ebony native boys who knelt in slightly different poses with thick squares of clear glass in their hands. Both were buck-naked except for matching white plastic sunglasses. (The boa constrictor’s sunglasses had red frames.)

“So what do you think?” asked Pell Austin from the kitchen doorway.

“Well, it’s certainly different,” I said.

“It’s all that’s left of my faux fey period,” he said in his gentle voice as I followed the aroma of fresh coffee back down the hall. “I keep it for sentimental reasons.”

His blue chambray shirt had mother-of-pearl snap buttons and looked freshly ironed, his red-and-blue neckerchief was crisply knotted, and his thick gray hair had been neatly combed, but from his bloodshot eyes and the lines of fatigue in his long thin face, I wondered if he’d made it to bed at all.

“People expect designers like me to live in larger-than-life settings. It’s part of the window dressing. Besides, Dix’s granddaughter likes to ride on the lion.”

He stepped aside to let me enter the tastefully designed kitchen and I glanced around with even more appreciation than I had given it last night, taking mental notes for my own future kitchen. “This room certainly doesn’t—”

I suddenly saw we were not alone. Seated at Pell’s breakfast table in front of a bowl of cereal was a young child who wore pink sneakers, jeans, and a Bugs Bunny T-shirt. Her hair was as thick and straight as Pell’s, the color of beach sand, and it was plaited into a single braid that hung halfway down her thin back. The shorter side wisps were held back by two plastic barrettes shaped like little yellow ducks.

“Well, hello,” I said.

Her two front baby teeth were missing and so far, only the leading edge of one adult tooth had emerged to fill the gap. She gave me an appealing lopsided smile. “Hello.”

“I just bet that you’re Lynnette.”

The child giggled at my unconscious rhymes and glanced at Pell. “She makes poems, too.”

“Judge Knott, may I present Miss Lynnette Nolan?” said Pell.

“Judge Knott/ got a lot/ of hot—” She ran out of rhyming words. “A lot of hot what, Uncle Pelly-Jelly?”

“Fudge?” I suggested.

“Judge Fudge?” She considered and then nodded. “That would work.” She cut her eyes mischievously at Pell. “ ’Specially since I’m not supposed to say snot.”

He ignored the bait and she grinned at me again.

I am always fascinated by the genetic repackaging of children. Whenever a new baby is born into our family, we can spend inordinate time deciding where he got his hair and eye coloring, skin tone, bones, the shape of his chin, the crook of his little finger and whether that sleepy burp indicates Knott patience, a Stephenson sense of humor, or merely the Carroll appetite.

The only time I’d seen Lynnette’s mother was when I once stopped past Dixie’s boarding house in Chapel Hill to drop off some study notes. Back then, Evelyn would have been a few years older than Lynnette was now, but I recalled a similar slender build and fair coloring. Something of Chan’s forehead was in her brow, and her eyes were blue like his even though hers had the same feline tilt as Dixie’s. There was something familiar about the way her small lips quirked that I couldn’t quite place until I remembered that Evelyn’s smile had also been delightfully asymmetrical.

“Judge/fudge/budge/grudge—if you’re a judge, do you have one of those little hammers?”

I nodded.

“Did you ever hit anybody with it?”

“No, I just bang it to make people be quiet.”

“You probably wish you had one now,” said Pell with mock severity.

Lynnette laughed and chattered brightly as she spooned Cheerios from a dark red cereal bowl. I gingerly sipped the orange juice Pell handed me. My stomach considered rebellion, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

“Grandmama’s talking to Aunt Millie and Uncle Quentin and Shirley Jane,” she told me. “They’re maybe going to come see us soon.”

I glanced at Pell and a slight shake of his head let me know that Lynnette had not yet been told of Chan’s death. I couldn’t fault Dixie for putting it off as long as possible, but it did limit conversation at the breakfast table. Instead, we discussed how much money Lynnette could expect to make off the Tooth Fairy in the next year or so, we heard how her cousin Shirley Jane was half a year younger but none of her teeth were loose yet, and we were given a demonstration of how nicely she could print our names.

“Next year we’ll write cursive. Daddy already showed me how to do a capital L. See?”

I learned that the school she attended was out this way from Lexington and close enough that she’d been staying with Dixie most of the spring because of Chan’s frequent trips to Texas and Malaysia. Normally, a baby-sitter drove her back and forth, “But Grandmama said I could stay home today.”

She doodled a wiry creature with four legs and a long tail on her paper. “Does this look like a monkey, Uncle Pell?”

Before he could answer, she said abruptly, “I wish Daddy wasn’t going to make us move so far away. Malaysia is even farther than Aunt Millie’s house and we have to drive all day to go see her.”

“To Frederick, Maryland?” Pell scoffed. “Four and a half hours tops.”

“Well, it seems like all day,” said Lynnette as she finished off her cereal and carried the empty bowl over to the dishwasher.

From their easy familiar manner toward each other, I guessed that Lynnette must have ran in and out of Pell’s house since birth.

Pell offered to fix me toast and scrambled eggs, but my stomach still felt too queasy for anything except coffee and juice. He thought that the soup kitchen wouldn’t open its door before noon, but he knew the number of a locksmith who agreed to meet me at my car so I could pick up my suitcase and the garment bag that held my judicial robe. At least, we agreed to meet where I’d left my car the day before. My back bumper carries a small shield that identifies me as an officer of the court plus stickers for temporary parking at several courthouses around the state, but that was no guarantee that some overly zealous traffic officer hadn’t had it towed.

“Take my van,” Pell said. ”I don’t keep any set schedule during Market Week and if you’re not due in court till ten, you can come back here and change and I’ll drop you at the courthouse.”

I started to demur but then Dixie let herself in the back door. She looked almost as haggard as I felt, and after I’d hugged her and heard that Chan’s sister was on her way, I accepted the keys to Pell’s blue Ford Aerostar and took myself off so that they could tell Lynnette in private.

My car had a parking ticket tucked under the wiper blade; otherwise my rendezvous with the locksmith—“Jimmy’s my name, and jimmying’s my game”—went off smoothly. Ol’ Jimmy had a door open before I finished writing a note of explanation on the back of the ticket in case that officer came back, then he put my suitcase and garment bag in Pell’s car and offered to get me a new set of keys for a price. I told him I’d let him know.

The morning paper had a little box on the front page: Fitch-Patterson Exec Dies and a few sketchy details.

“Lynnette took it as well as could be expected, I suppose,” said Pell as he drove me over to the courthouse an hour later after I was freshly dressed, combed and lip-sticked. “Cried a little and then said she didn’t mean that she really didn’t want to go to Kuala Lumpur.”

“Oh Lord.”

“Yeah. We both told her that wasn’t why her Daddy died, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to get her some counseling to make her believe it. Dix, too, for that matter.”

“Oh?”

“It was tearing her to pieces that Chan was moving Lynnette halfway around the globe.” That long lank of straight gray hair fell boyishly across his eye and he pushed it aside with a heavy sigh. “She’s going to have a hard time making herself believe she’s not glad he’s dead.”

“Dixie’s lucky to have you next door,” I said as we headed downtown.

Rush hour was past, but the Market vans and buses that shuttled between downtown and satellite parking areas were out in full force.

“Have you two known each other long?”

“Since first grade at Sedgeneld School over in Greensboro. She was in the third grade and the bus stop was in front of her house. About the fourth day, some big kid—big to me anyhow—tried to take my lunch bag and she sailed in and bloodied his nose.”

I smiled, remembering a few noses I’d bloodied in school myself.

“Both our fathers had taken off before we could walk, but Mrs. Babcock and—”

“Dixie’s mother?”

He raised his eyebrow at the surprise in my voice.

Disconcerted, I said, “I guess it didn’t occur to me back then that Dixie had kept her maiden name.”

His half-smile made me realize what else I hadn’t picked up on and I could feel myself turning red.

“Evelyn would be what now?” I asked defensively. ‘Twenty-four?”

“Twenty-five. Almost twenty-six.”

“Whatever. The point is, twenty-six years ago, nice middle-class Southern girls like Dixie didn’t openly raise a child born out of wedlock.”

“Who said we came from a nice middle-class neighborhood?” he asked sardonically as he slowed for a long white stretch limo that was hogging both lanes.

I didn’t have an answer to that one.

“Actually, it was worse than middle-class,” he said, taking pity on my embarrassment. “It was poor-white respectable, and Dix didn’t hang around to be preached at. She took off to someplace down East before anybody here knew she was pregnant.”

“What about the father?”

“He never knew. He was just someone she met down at the beach the Easter before she graduated. A gang of senior girls went down for spring break, met some guys from the Citadel. You know how it goes.”

I did. Too much Carolina moon, too much warm spring nights, too much beer and pot. Been there, done that, but only bought the T-shirt, luckily—not a baby.

“Close as we were, Dixie didn’t even tell me. Just dropped out of sight. First I knew about Evelyn was when I found her again, when she was going for that law degree.”

“At Chapel Hill?”

“Yeah. I was over there helping Savannah design and decorate a funky place on Franklin Street—the owner had more money than taste—and there was Dix, working the afternoon shift at a coffee bar next door. I hadn’t seen her since high school and even then, I don’t think she’d have told me about Evelyn except that she was pouring me an espresso when the phone call came that some drunk had plowed through a school crossing. I rushed Dix over to the hospital and I was still there when the doctors came out of surgery and said Evelyn was going to be fine. And she was, but it took a lot of nursing and physical therapy and Dix had to quit law school.”

“Surely there was insurance money?”

“From the drunk? Yeah. They got a nice settlement. Eventually. After the guy’s parents dragged it through court for two years trying to keep it off his record.”

He edged the van around the limo and took a left over to North Centennial. Several blocks ahead, the new courthouse rose white and gleaming at the top of a hill, in contrast to the huge navy-blue cluster of windowless GHFM buildings off to the right.

“She had it rough, didn’t she? I never knew how rough.” Even though Dixie and I hadn’t been particularly close, learning what she’d gone through back then made me feel callous and self-centered in retrospect.

“You were younger then,” Pell said, reading my mind. “You probably had your own problems.”

Well, yes, there was that.

He pulled up to a side door of the courthouse.

“But everything worked out great after they came to High Point.” His voice turned suddenly venomous. “Until Evelyn married that prick.”

I wanted to ask what he meant, but a uniformed guard was motioning for us to move it.

Pell handed me a house key. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but make yourself at home.”

I thanked him and hurried inside. Only ten minutes to do the professional courtesies and find the courtroom for Randy J. Verlin vs. April Ann Jenner for the custody of Travis Tritt Verlin, minor.

Which was where Detective David Underwood found me.