Killer Market

13

« ^ » “The firm have in their employ several designers or artists who occupy separate rooms, in different parts of the building, and who do not intercommunicate, each depending upon his own unaided genius in devising sketches for the models.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

“Other mother?”

Drew smiled when I repeated Lynnette’s words later that night. “I guess it probably sounds like that to a child. I’ve known Savannah since I was a baby and she took me under her wing when I was a bratty kid not much older than Lynnette. She was doing a catalog for Fitch and Patterson and she let me help dress the sets. She was really more like a mentor or a fairy godmother and I absolutely worshiped her to the point that it made my mother a little jealous. When I thought I wanted to become a freelance designer, Savannah let me hang out at Mulholland and taught me some of the basics.”

“That’s what you do now?”

“Except that I design exclusively for Fitch and Patterson.”

A cynical thought crossed my mind and she must have seen it on my face.

“I may be a Patterson, Deborah, but that doesn’t mean I’m a dilettante. I work pretty damn hard and I have a good eye for fabrics.” She said it as a matter of fact, not conceit. “There are only so many designs for a chair or a couch. It takes fabric and color to keep the product fresh. I was one of the first in the industry to recognize how popular chenille could be. Because of me, we were ahead of the curve, not following it.”

Again, an absurd image of fuzzy chenilles romped through my mind. “I heard someone today say that chenille’s dead.”

“Fading perhaps in the premium market but it’ll hold strong in the upper- to mid-range for at least another year or two. Longer in the low end, but by then we’ll be into something else.”

The April night was so mild that my light sweater was warmth enough. We were sitting in white wicker rocking chairs on Pell Austin’s screened side porch where we could see the steady stream of people coming and going from Dixie’s house. Market people, Fitch and Patterson people, people who had known Chan and who cared about Dixie—it looked as if half of High Point had come to pay their respects to Chan’s mother-in-law and sister tonight

A local TV van had been there earlier, in time for the 5:30 news. Dixie had made a statement So far, my name had been kept out of it. Since she was Chan’s mother-in-law and the one who called 911, the reporters seemed to assume she was the one who found him. So far, everyone who’d spoken on-camera—including Jay Patterson, Kay Adams and Jacob Collier—was profoundly shocked and everyone was just devastated by his death.

At least that’s what they were saying for publication.

Lynnette and her cousin Shirley Jane were sound asleep on my bed in Pell’s guest room and I wasn’t quite sure where I myself would wind up sleeping, but for the moment, it was my job to keep an ear out for them. Drew, probably at Dixie’s suggestion, had come over to bring me a plate of chicken salad and some iced tea, and she seemed grateful to get away from the grief and gloom that wrapped Dixie’s house now that Chan’s sister was here.

Upon arriving this afternoon, Millie Ragsdale had immediately announced that there would be no traditional funeral.

Despite her misgivings, Dixie was deferring to her wishes.

“Not my wishes,” Millie Ragsdale said. “Chan’s wishes. He wrote them down and sent them to me the same time he sent me a copy of his will. Right after Evelyn died.”

I had no memory of Chan’s sister, but there was no mistaking the family resemblance. Nor her determination to carry out her brother’s instructions.

“Chan hated funerals,” she said. “He always said, ‘Millie, don’t let them stick me in a box and then stand around looking at me for three days,’ and I promised him I wouldn’t.”

That’s why tonight would be the closest thing to a real wake that Chan would have. The Medical Examiner had released his body this afternoon and as soon as she heard that, Millie had asked her husband Quentin to make arrangements with a crematorium.

“Next month, when the worst of our pain is over,” she’d said tremulously, “we’ll have a memorial service in Frederick and scatter his ashes somewhere along the river.”

By this time, for all I knew, Chan’s body had already been committed to the flames. Even now, all that was corporeal of him might be cooling somewhere in Guilford County.

“Did Savannah kill him?” I asked Drew abruptly.

“Savannah!” Drew sat upright and turned so quickly in her chair to face me that the rockers scraped the wooden porch floor. “What makes you think Savannah had anything to do with Chan’s death?”

Dixie had been told that penicillin had brought on Chan’s anaphylactic shock and I assumed Drew knew, too.

She nodded. “That’s what David told me.”

“David?”

“Detective Underwood. His daughter works for us in our billing department. I’ve known him since he used to direct Market traffic in uniform.”

I should have realized that there’d be a connection. Everybody in High Point seemed to have direct links to the furniture industry.

“Did you tell him where Savannah’s staying?”

“But I don’t know! She won’t say. She just suddenly appears when I least expect her.”

“But you did tell him you could put him in touch with her?”

“I said I’d try,” she answered patiently. “But I still don’t see the point of it.”

“But didn’t Underwood ask about my tote bag?”

“He asked if I saw Savannah take it. He didn’t say why.”

“So did you see her?”

“With one of our tote bags? Sure. And everybody else, too. We’re giving out three hundred a day. Every time I turn around I see one. What difference does it make anyhow?”

“Because the one she walked out with was mine. It had my purse in it and in my purse was a bottle of penicillin tablets. Detective Underwood found my tote near Chan last night but the pill bottle was empty. If Savannah didn’t take them, who did?”

“It was your penicillin?”

For some reason, her tone made me defensive. “I had a strep throat last week.”

“Perhaps she left your bag there before Chan came. Perhaps someone else found your tablets.”

I took a sip of iced tea and thought it over. “I don’t see how there’d be enough time. She was wandering around High Point with my cell phone a little after nine and I found Chan less than an hour later. Someone would have had to take my bag away from her, see the tablets, know Chan was allergic, crush them into the brownies and then somehow lure him down to Dixie’s floor and get him to eat them. All that in fifty minutes? I don’t think so.”

“Someone who knew he was that allergic…” Drew’s chair rocked back and forth with gentle creaks. “I wonder how many people did know. I certainly didn’t.”

“No?”

She shook her head. “I mean I knew he couldn’t take penicillin like everyone else, but not that it could kill him. And I knew him about as well as anybody at Market. He never wanted to talk about any kind of health problem.”

Out in the street, car doors slammed and engines cranked up as people came and went from Dixie’s house.

“So I guess the first question is did Savannah know and the next is would Chan have taken food from her?”

“Chan would have taken anything from any woman,” Drew sighed. “Especially chocolate.”

She gave me a speculative glance. “It’s a good thing you didn’t have time to get to know him or David would probably have you in handcuffs since they were your tablets. But to answer your other question, yes, he’d take brownies from Savannah because he knew her from before. His wife Evelyn—Lynnette’s mother? Did you know her?”

“Not really.”

“She worked at Mulholland, too. Not with Savannah. With Pell Austin’s group.”

There was a touch of condescension in her voice and for a moment I saw a hint of the pecking order that must have existed in the design studio where the brilliant Savannah had overshadowed her colleagues. Drew might have been a couple of years younger than Evelyn, but as Savannah’s protégé, she would have ranked higher than Dixie’s daughter even without her wealthy background.

A tall, patrician-looking man was caught in a car’s headlights as he crossed the street, and Drew sat up sharply. “Well, bless his heart!”

“Who is it?” Even in the headlights, all I could make out were silver hair and erect carriage.

“Jacob Collier. Good for him,” she said approvingly. “He may not cut it in the field anymore, but he still has style.”

“I thought you said he got in a fight with Chan last night”

“He did. That’s what I mean. He was furious at Chan for taking away some of the accounts he was hoping to give Tracy and Vic, but he’s man enough to forget about last night and remember all the good years.”

“He’s alone,” I observed.

“Well, I’m not saying Tracy Collier’s got her grandfather’s style,” Drew drawled.

She said it with enough bitchiness in her tone to remind me that Dixie had considered Drew in the running for Chan’s affections even though Drew herself kept saying that they were only good pals. On the other hand, good pals can care enough to keep a wary eye on a pal’s romantic entanglements. Dwight Bryant’s always treated me like a younger sister, but he doesn’t miss an opportunity to snipe at Kidd.

“What about Savannah, though?” I asked, returning to my first question. “If she thinks you’re her daughter and that Lynnette’s your daughter, then maybe she saw Chan with Tracy Collier or that Trocchi woman from Hickory-Dock—”

“Lavelle Trocchi.”

“—and thought he was being unfaithful to you.”

“And being a good mother, poisoned him so I’d never have to hear he was unfaithful?” she asked sardonically.

Put like that, it did sound absurd.

“I’m not saying it’s sane, but then neither is Savannah, is she? What about the time she smashed her car?”

“What about it?” she asked cautiously.

“You think it’s sane to smash an expensive car just because you’re mad at your insurance company?”

In the dim light, Drew looked uncomfortable. “She has extreme mood swings—what she calls episodes. When she’s up, she’s brilliant. Nobody comes close to her style. But when she’s down? For years, everyone thought she went off on glamorous junkets between projects. Wrong. Her money’s gone to pay for stays at a psychiatric facility somewhere in Georgia where they get her medications balanced.”

I thought of Savannah’s pills, neatly lined up beside the turkey croissant I’d bought her yesterday. From my mental-health hearings, I know how difficult it is to keep the medications balanced in delusional manic-depressives, or bipolars, or whatever the correct term is these days. If indeed she’s any of them.

“Does she have family down there?”

“A father maybe? I’m not sure. Pell knows.”

“He does?” That surprised me.

“The last time she flipped, Pell was the one who got to her first. He called down there and somebody came and got her.”

We rocked in silence for a moment, then she observed, “A lot of gay men have women friends, but I think Pell really likes women. After Evelyn got hit by that car and had to have all that therapy, he got Dixie that house, got her that job. When Evelyn died, it hurt him just about as bad as it did Dixie and he loves Lynnette better than anything else in the world. He was absolutely furious that Chan was going to take her off to Malaysia.”

“Pell wouldn’t be the first gay person who wanted to link himself to the future. It’s human nature,” I said.

Yet I couldn’t help wondering just how furious Pell really had been.

Enough to kill?