Killer Market

9

« ^ » “Chair manufacturing is carried on by contract in several of the prisons and penal establishments in the country, and it is a very important American industry.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

“Chan Nolan’s death was a homicide?” I was bewildered as I followed Detective Underwood out to his car. “But the doctor said it was an allergic reaction. Anaphylactic shock.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He held the door open for me on a car ankle-deep in empty foam coffee cups and crumpled hamburger wrappers—“Just kick ’em out of your way,” he murmured—and we drove the short distance to police headquarters on Leonard Street “We have a little problem with how he ingested the agent.”

Here at lunchtime, the streets were clogged again with shuttle vans, cars with license plates from a dozen different states, and a couple of black limos of ordinary length.

“I can’t get over the difference,” I said, telling Detective Underwood how deserted the streets seemed the day my friend and I drove through.

“Most of the year, we’re just another Piedmont mill town. But during Market, we—oh damn and blast and expletive deleted!” he muttered as a shuttle van stopped in our lane to let someone out.

Detective David Underwood was an impatient driver and he squeezed his car through nonexistent openings and narrow alleyways.

The brick and concrete block building on Leonard Street was a remodeled school, he told me, and once we were inside, he took me into a small room that could have been the school nurse’s office. A uniformed officer quickly and efficiently rolled my fingertips, one at a time, from ink pad to a card that could be scanned by the computer.

I cleaned my hands with a packaged towelette, then followed Underwood as he stopped by the squad room to pick up a legal pad and a bulky manila envelope from a desk that was even messier than his car.

A few steps farther down the hall was a tiny interview room no bigger than six foot square and bare of all furnishings save two straight-backed chairs that faced each other across a small metal table.

Underwood rummaged in his manila envelope and pulled out a clear plastic bag with a brown plastic prescription bottle inside.

“This yours?”

The label was still intact. If I could clearly read my name and my doctor’s, surely he could as well.

“Do we really have to play games, Detective Underwood?” I asked. “Of course it’s mine. Penicillin. And it’s hours past my time for another dose.”

I reached for the bag, but Underwood continued to hold it.

“How many tablets are supposed to be here?”

“Six? Or is it four?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, ma’am.”

His tone wasn’t threatening, just mildly inquisitive, and I knew he was just doing his job, but lack of food and sleep was starting to make me cranky. Nevertheless I tried to hold on to my temper as I worked it out on my fingers.

“I started with thirty. Three tablets a day for ten days… breakfast, mid-afternoon and bedtime… But I didn’t take last night’s and I still have today’s to go… Four?”

He handed me the baggie. “Shake it.”

Empty.

The bottom fell out of my stomach.

“That’s what put Chan Nolan into anaphylactic shock? My penicillin?”

“According to his allergist, even one tablet would be dangerous for him. Didn’t you see his Medic Alert medallion when you were dancing with him last night?”

“I remember two gold chains, but if there was a medallion, it must have been tucked inside his shirt. I certainly didn’t read it.”

“No?” He twisted one end of his thick brown mustache into a sharp point and regarded me with those warm brown eyes.

“And I certainly wasn’t his only dancing partner.”

“So far though, you’re the only one with missing penicillin tablets,” he pointed out.

“The only one you know about,” I snapped.

“A soft answer turneth away wrath,” warned the preacher deep inside my head.

“Losing your temper is not the way to go,” agreed the pragmatist who shares the same space. “He’s not Dwight.”

“Half the medicine cabinets in America must be stocked with half-empty bottles of penicillin,” I said as calmly as I could. “Besides, from early in the evening, I didn’t even have mine.”

I described the mix-up with tote bags and he wanted to know who’d been where from the minute I set my tote under the table. He wrote down all the names, beginning with Savannah, continuing through Dixie Babcock, Drew Patterson and her father Jay, Kay Adams and her colleague Poppy Jackson, Heather McKenzie, Mai and Jeff Stanberry, and, even though I didn’t know her, that Lavelle Trocchi who was supposed to have given Chan the Hickory-Dock catalog last month and who, according to Dixie, had been next to the table.

He was particularly interested in the plate of food Drew had fixed for Chan and which Dixie had actually handed to him, “although Dr. Harrison says that with that much penicillin, Nolan would have started to react immediately. You sure you didn’t see him again after you left that ballroom?”

As he wrote down my denial, the officer who’d taken my fingerprints tapped on the door, stuck his head in and said, “Two hits on the baggie, Dave.”

“What baggie?” I asked apprehensively.

“The tablets were crushed and stuck into some brownies. We found a baggie in his jacket pocket with brownie crumbs and some of the penicillin residue. Your prints are on the baggie.”

“That’s impossible!” I snapped. And then I remembered the zip-lock bag that Savannah had dropped.

My sudden recollection and hasty account of picking up the bag sounded limp and guilty even to my ears. With as much dignity as I could muster, I said, “Dwight Bryant’s the deputy sheriff over in Colleton County and he’s known me since I was born. He’ll tell you I don’t make a habit of going around killing perfect strangers.”

(Okay, so maybe that was a slight fudging of the facts, but I knew our brief acquaintance in Maryland wasn’t relevant. For all practical purposes, Chan had been a stranger and I really didn’t want to talk about that time.)

“I’ll give you his phone number.”

Underwood’s shaggy brown mustache quivered and I realized he was grinning. “I already talked to Major Bryant this morning before I went over to the courthouse.”

“Well, then,” I said.

“Always a first time.” His grin faded as he asked me again about the people I’d seen in Chan Nolan’s company.

He particularly concentrated on Savannah’s movements. “You’re positive she’d already left the table and the room with your bag before Nolan joined your group?”

“If you don’t believe me, ask Heather McKenzie. She followed the woman out.”

His legal pad lay on the narrow table between us and he made no attempt to conceal it as he drew a heavy black arrow on his notepad from Heather’s name to Savannah’s. “Now, Judge, what makes you think I don’t believe you?”

“The question marks you’re drawing around that arrow, maybe?”

He smiled. “And you’re staying with Nolan’s mother-in-law, right?”

“She found me the place, but it’s actually with her neighbor next door.”

He took down Pell Austin’s address and telephone number, then gave me back my tote bag and purse. The empty penicillin bottle he kept. So far as I could tell, nearly everything else seemed present and accounted for, right down to my cell phone, checkbook and car keys. I usually had three tubes of lipstick. The darkest one was gone. Gone, too, were my nail clippers. And I was in the habit of dropping in my loose change. Sometimes there would be five or six dollars’ worth of coins rattling around at the bottom. At the moment, there were only a nickel and three pennies.

Underwood made a note of it even though I considered them a small enough payment for getting my other things back.

“I’ll have someone drive you to your car,” he said, “and, Judge?”

“Yes?”

“Major Bryant also told me that you’re bad for sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong—his words, not mine.” His half-teasing tone became wholly serious. “Do us all a favor while you’re in High Point, Judge? Don’t.”