Killer Market

15

« ^ » “Banks are but one of the complex series of organizations in which the morality, the knowledge, and the activity of the times are expressed.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

I was so stunned I could only sit there in the half-darkness looking as guilty as a yard dog slinking out of the henhouse.

“What baby?” I asked dumbly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”

“Aren’t you the same Deborah Knott that’s Miss Barbara Peabody’s niece?”

“Well, yes.” No point in denying something so easily checked.

“Chan told me all about you that summer,” said Millie Ragsdale. “And he told me why you left when you did:—because he got you pregnant.”

“There’s only been one immaculate conception,” I said hotly, “and I wasn’t there for that one, either. I don’t know why he’d tell you such a thing, but he was lying.”

“He said you wouldn’t leave him alone. Couldn’t keep your hands off him.”

“Oh, please. Your brother was a horny teenager with over-active glands and what was obviously an overactive imagination. He was at least two years younger than me and I certainly didn’t go to bed with him.”

This was the truth, technically speaking, but only because Aunt Barbara had walked up on us in the gazebo at the crucial moment and I had split for New York soon afterwards. However, this was not something I felt compelled to say with everyone—including Detective David Underwood—staring at me as if my nose was growing longer with every word I spoke.

“When I introduced you,” Dixie said suddenly, “Chan did say y’all had met before.”

I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Hey, wait a minute here. This is getting blown way out of proportion. Yes, I met a kid named Chandler Nolan a hundred years ago and yes, I went with him to a couple of movies and let him kiss me a few times and maybe there was even some heavy breathing. But that was all. I don’t care what kind of bragging he did, Mrs. Ragsdale, that was all. And as for me leaving because I was pregnant? In his dreams.”

“Wet, no doubt,” Pell murmured wickedly from the shadows beside me.

Millie Ragsdale glared at him.

“I left because he was a ruddy nuisance. He was supposed to be there to cut my aunt’s grass and weed her rose garden. Instead, I couldn’t step out the door without him being all over me like flypaper.”

“You were after him,” his sister insisted.

“He was a kid,” I told her gently. “A pimply-faced, gangly kid with too much imagination. Think back to when you were nineteen. Think about the enormous gulf between a nineteen-year-old woman and a seventeen-year-old boy. At that age, would you have had sex with a boy two years younger than you?”

At first, I thought she was going to deny the thought of sex with anyone before marriage. Instead, she said stubbornly, “Chan was never pimply-faced.”

For some reason, Quentin Ragsdale couldn’t let that pass. “Yes, he was, Mill. I remember how he always had Noxzema and Clearasil in his gym bag. And he did like to brag about girls he never really had.”

Millie looked at him, suddenly tearful. “Whose side are you on, Quentin?”

He reached out and touched her hand. “There aren’t any sides here, hon, and you’re tired.”

His words seemed to diffuse the tension that hers had built up and there was a general stirring as everyone suddenly realized that yes, it was getting late. Long day today. And longer tomorrow, no doubt.

It was quickly decided that the Ragsdales and Shirley Jane would drive on over to Lexington, that Lynnette would finish the night in my bed and that I could move into Dixie’s guest room.

As the others went inside the house, David Underwood drew me to one side.

“You got anything planned for tomorrow morning, Judge?”

“Not really,” I answered. “Why?”

“Then how about you come down to my office around ten o’clock?”

The invitation did not sound optional, so I smiled a smile of as much pure innocence as I could muster and told him I’d be happy to meet him then.

“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” Dixie asked later as I was making up her guest bed with clean sheets.

She had packed Chan’s overnight case, zipped his extra shirts and jackets into his garment bag, and was now clearing his toiletries from the half bath next door.

“When did I have a chance?”

“At the hospital?”

“Right. While you were worried and feeling guilty because you weren’t there when Chan got to your floor, I was supposed to say ‘And by the way, your son-in-law tried to get in my pants when I was going through a rough time in my life’? I wasn’t being secretive, Dixie. Honest. It just seemed so irrelevant”

She paused with Chan’s toothbrush, dental floss and razor in her hand. “But after he died—?”

“It was still irrelevant. And a complication I don’t need.” I smoothed the sheets and reached for a fresh pillowcase. “Now I’ve got to go down to Underwood’s office tomorrow and spend a couple of hours convincing him that I didn’t bear Chan’s love child and then murder him twenty years after the non-fact.”

“Serves you right,” she said tartly, and I knew that at least one person believed me.

She cut those slanted, catlike eyes at me. “Heavy breathing, huh?”

I threw the pillow at her.

We were both tired, but too wound up for sleep, so Dixie found an open bottle of white wine in her refrigerator and we carried our glasses into the living room, a room that was warm and inviting and personalized with family photographs, keepsakes and a shelf full of bulging scrapbooks. We curled up at either end of the long couch and played “Whatever Happened to What’s Her Name?” for a while until talk drifted into more personal channels.

I told her about Kidd. She told me about an intense affair that had ended in rancor shortly before Evelyn’s death and how she thought she’d maybe just quit trying. “But I met someone down at the Tupelo Market in February. Tom’s not handsome, but he’s awfully nice. He acts as if I’m special—”

“As well he should,” I murmured.

“—and he makes me laugh.”

We agreed that laughter was important.

“What about Pell?” I asked when we’d thoroughly dissected Dixie’s love life. “I don’t see any signs that he’s sharing his house with anyone.”

She sighed and shook her head. “You don’t know what a hellish two years it’s been. First we lost Evelyn and then we lost James.”

“He and Pell?”

She nodded. “He was an investment broker. Knew the stock market like I know High Point Thanks to him, Pell and I both have solid investment programs.”

She half knelt on the couch to pluck a small framed photograph from the collection on the table behind us. It showed Pell and another man head-to-head in an affectionately clowning pose.

“To look at James, you’d think he was gray tweed, button-down collars and all business. You’ve seen Pell’s living room?”

I smiled.

“Yeah. Well, James was the one who found the boa constrictor and he was the one who put sunglasses on the Nubian slave boys. They were together for eight years.”

“Why did they break up?”

“They didn’t. He died last summer.”

“Oh, Dixie!” Apprehension touched my heart as I asked the inevitable question. “AIDS?”

She shook her head. “Pancreatic cancer. Thirty-nine days after he was diagnosed, he was dead.”

We had another glass of wine and eventually our talk wound back to Savannah, and I described for Dixie my impression of the picture in Heather McKenzie’s car. “She really looked like a dynamo. I would imagine her love life was pretty active.”

Dixie sipped her wine reflectively. “At one time or another, I’ve heard her linked with everybody from Mack Keehbler and Jay Patterson to Jacob Collier and—”

“Jacob Collier?”

“Oh yes. Jacob may be pushing eighty but the man’s a billy goat with monkey glands.”

I had to laugh at the image that conjured up, and remembering the snippet of gossip I’d overheard at the Discovery Center, I said, “I guess Chan thought his sex life undercut his effectiveness as a salesman.”

“Come again?”

“I heard someone say Chan was annoyed about Collier’s heavy dating.”

Dixie leaned back against the burgundy velvet cushions and laughed so hard that her eyes disappeared into slanted crinkles.

“What?” I said, kicking her with my stockinged feet. “What’s so funny?”

“You. You don’t have a clue as to what heavy dating is, do you?”

“If it’s that funny, I guess I don’t.”

“Actually,” she said, sobering up, “it’s not all that funny. Not for Jacob Collier. Heavy dating got him in trouble all right, but it has nothing to do with his sexual proclivities. See, dating is the number of days a sales rep will give a retailer to pay off the sale, usually in increments of thirty: thirty, sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty, or two-forty. Chan was going over some of Jacob’s accounts and saw that he’d given Kay Adams and Poppy Jackson datings of two hundred and forty days on a half-million of goods. That’s incredible these days. It’s like turning Fitch and Patterson into a personal loan banker, which is another reason why Chan was going to pull their business. They keep too much inventory on hand and they rely too much on heavy dating instead of turning the merchandise over. More aggressive businesses depend on smaller inventories, better management, jazzier sales techniques, et cetera for quick turn-arounds. And they pay up in a thirty-sixty-ninety-day time frame.”

That I could understand. “And what’s the Golden Egg?”

Dixie smiled. “It’s what sales people call this territory. North Carolina not only has some of the biggest retailers in the country, we also have the transshippers here. Very lucrative pickings.”

“Drew says that Tracy Collier and her dad would normally inherit her grandfather’s sales territory.”

“Was Chan going to cut into her Golden Egg?” Dixie asked maliciously. “You’d better believe it!”

“I gather you don’t like her. Because she’s ambitious?”

“I don’t mind legitimate ambition. Jacob’s made a lot of money over the years here, but he genuinely cares about my small retailers. I don’t know his son, but I do know that Tracy only cares about the money. And the power. She’s bright, she’s pretty, and she went after Chan with everything in her arsenal, including messing with Evelyn’s head. She asked Evelyn to give him a divorce. And that’s where she cut her throat with Chan. As I told you before, he might flirt around, but he loved Evelyn, wanted the marriage to work and he was so happy about the baby. After what Tracy did, her days were numbered. Chan’d already taken some of Jacob’s best accounts for the house and he planned to convert most of the rest before he went to Jacaranda. Tracy would have been lucky to have enough egg left for Sunday brunch.”

“Sounds like a motive for murder to me,” I observed.

Dixie’s feline eyes narrowed. “It does, doesn’t it? Too bad she wasn’t there when Savannah walked out with your bag.”

“But did she know Chan was that allergic to penicillin? Drew said she didn’t and she must have known him for years.”

“Allergies didn’t go with his macho image,” Dixie said. “He thought allergies were for wimps and always downplayed his. I remember last summer when we were all up at the Pattersons’ camp on Hidden Lake for the company’s annual outing. Chan was in the middle of a course of antibiotics for a root canal and he forgot to bring his pills that day. Elizabeth Patterson offered him some penicillin tablets she had left over from some minor infection or other and he said maybe it wouldn’t hurt to skip a couple of doses. She insisted until he finally admitted he had a problem with penicillin but he really didn’t like having to tell her.”

Dixie may have understood why I hadn’t mentioned knowing Chan, but by noon the next day, I began to feel that she was a distinct minority.

Before I’d even had my first cup of coffee, she called me to the telephone and there was Dwight Bryant fuming in my ear.

“What the hell’s going on up there, Deb’rah?” he asked. “I’ve just got off the phone with David Underwood for the second time in two days about you. How come you’re lying to him about that guy that got himself killed? With your penicillin tablets, too?”

“I didn’t lie,” I said stiffly.

“He sure thinks you did.”

“Okay, maybe I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I certainly didn’t lie.”

“Yeah, I know you and your maybe-I-didn’t- tell-the-whole-truth. Listen, Deb’rah. This is no joke. Yesterday morning, Underwood thought you had means and opportunity. Today, he thinks you’ve got motive, too. I’ve calmed him down a little, but quit playing games with him, okay?”

Indignation rose within me. “I’m not playing games.”

“Want me to call John Claude for you?”

“Oh, Lord, no! Don’t you dare.” That’s all I’d need. Having to explain all this to my very proper cousin, John Claude Lee, who happens to be my former law partner and current attorney? “And don’t you breathe a word about this to my daddy or Aunt Zell either, you hear?”

“Then behave yourself, okay?”

“Okay,” I said meekly.

And I really meant to.

“You told me Chan Nolan was a perfect stranger,” said Detective Underwood.

“I believe my exact words were that I didn’t go around killing perfect strangers,” I said.

“Implying that Nolan was.”

We were once again seated across from each other in one of the department’s featureless interrogation rooms, with Underwood’s well-doodled yellow legal pad between us once more. His mustache seemed shorter and neater than it had last evening and I realized that he’d had a haircut and trim this morning.

“I’m sorry you took it that way,” I apologized, resisting the temptation to smartmouth. “But for all intents and purposes, he was a stranger. It was so long ago and so insignificant that I honestly did think it was irrelevant.”

“If it was so insignificant, why didn’t you mention it when you had the chance?” he growled.

“For this very reason. You think I don’t know how suspicious this looks? My bag taken, my tablets used? If I told you that I’d once known Chan, this is exactly how I thought you’d react”

He leaned back in his chair and fingered his mustache as he thought about it

“I talked to the Stanberrys,” he said finally.

“Oh?”

“They say if you were faking your surprise when you pulled out that fried chicken instead of your checkbook, you ought to be on TV instead of wasting that talent on the bench.”

I felt a small trickle of relief. “Thanks… I think.”

“ ’Course, your Major Bryant tells me you’re pretty active in your local little theater down there in Dobbs.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I started to fume. And then I realized that he was laughing at me beneath that thick clump of brown hair on his upper lip.

“I see Dwight also told you which of my chains to yank.”

His grin broadened. “He did say you were real easy to rile.”

“Joking aside,” I said earnestly. “I did not sleep with Chan Nolan, I did not carry his baby, and I most certainly did not know that he was allergic to penicillin. Have you talked with Savannah yet?”

He shook his head. “She’s a hard one to catch, what with Market in full swing. We staked out the soup kitchen and the design studio where she used to work—she’s still got office space over there, you know that?—but so far we’ve come up empty. She’s not sleeping in any of the shelters that we can tell.”

“Did you talk to Drew Patterson?”

“She swears she doesn’t know. Says the woman won’t take any money from her, just wants to be with her.”

“Then couldn’t she—?”

“Get her to light long enough to call us?”

I nodded.

“She’s going to try, but who knows? Since you seem to keep running into her, let me give you my pager number just in case.”

He scribbled down the number on the end of the sheet, tore it off and handed it to me. There were nine digits on the paper, not seven.

“What’s this three-five at the end?”

“So I’ll know it’s you calling. That is how old you are, isn’t it?”

“Close enough,” I said dryly.

He picked up his pencil again, turned to a fresh sheet in his notepad and said, ‘Tell me again what you saw and heard Thursday evening, from the first minute Savannah sat down at your table in the food court.”

So I told it once more, right up to when the doctor came and told us Chan was dead.

“And you never once caught a glimpse of Savannah during the time you were wandering the halls at GHFM or driving over to the soup kitchen with this reporter, this—” He riffled through the messy pages looking for her name.

“Heather McKenzie. No.”

“And no sign of Chan Nolan?”

“No.”

“The Pattersons? The Trocchi woman? The Colliers? Dixie Babcock? Or what about those dealers that cornered Nolan at the Leathergoods party?”

“No, no, and no,” I said wearily. “I’ve told you. I didn’t see a single familiar face from the time I left the party till I met Ms. McKenzie in the stairwell. And she was it till we got back to Ms. Babcock’s floor. I can’t swear that I didn’t pass Ms. Trocchi or Ms. Collier because I don’t know them. Dixie said she was talking to the Trocchi woman when she spotted me, but I didn’t notice her.”

David Underwood made a notation on his notepad and I almost had to smile. He had turned to that sheet only moments earlier, yet it was already dog-eared and smudged and had begun to tear along the perforations at the top. Two scraps of paper had fallen on the floor and a pencil with a broken lead lay at the edge of the table ready to join them. Amazing. The man himself was immaculately groomed and neatly dressed in a fresh beige pin-striped shirt, crisp green and blue tie, and sharply creased brown slacks, but I had seen his car, his desk and now even this bare room: everything he touched became chaotic and messy.

I couldn’t help wondering what his clearance rate was on his caseload

He tapped the pencil against the pad, making random scratch marks. “Now when you got back to Dixie’s—Ms. Babcock’s?”

“Pell Austin was there. He fixed us a snack. We ate, we talked. Dixie called Chan’s sister and left a message on her machine, then we talked some more and finally called it a night and went to bed around three in the morning.”

“In Mr. Austin’s guest room.”

“Right.”

“And Mr. Austin and Ms. Babcock also called it a night?”

“Well, no. After I turned out my light, I heard him go out the back door and saw him cross the alley to Dixie’s. Her light was still on.”

“You didn’t go with him?”

“Of course not. I assumed they wanted to discuss Chan’s death without a relative stranger sitting there and besides, I was exhausted. I don’t think I turned over once before I fell sound asleep.”

“So you don’t know when Mr. Austin returned?”

I shook my head. “Sorry. I did hear him come in, and there’s a clock radio beside the bed, but I was too tired to notice. Is it important?”

“Possibly. Mrs. Ragsdale called me this morning. One of Nolan’s neighbors over there in Lexington saw lights on in the house early Friday morning. She didn’t think anything about it till she heard he’d died and then she started wondering. Mrs. Ragsdale says there’s no sign of break-in so whoever was there probably had a key to the house.”

“And you think that’s Dixie or Pell?”

“Well, now, I don’t think anything just yet. Both of ’em told me that Mr. Austin went back to Ms. Babcock’s for a book he’d left there and that they talked a few minutes and then he went home and she went to bed.”

“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” whispered the preacher.

“But what if they only ran out for doughnuts or to pick up a carton of milk?” argued the pragmatist.

“Then they should have told him, not lied. Look at the mess you got yourself in by not telling the whole truth the first time around,” said the preacher. “You going to do it again? That’s wrong.”

“And stupid,” said the pragmatist.

Okay, maybe it was stupid, but it didn’t feel wrong. I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell Detective Underwood that I’d seen Dixie and Pell returning in his van early yesterday morning. If they hadn’t taken me in Thursday night, I might have had to sleep on the street. How could I repay their hospitality by ratting on them?

“I really don’t have a clue as to what time it was,” I said truthfully. “It could have been ten minutes, it could have been two hours for all I know. Was anything missing from the house?”

“Mrs. Ragsdale says the cleaning lady was there on Thursday after Nolan and the little girl left for High Point. Everything was tidy when she and her husband got there last night. She can’t tell if anything’s gone.”

When you play cards with a bunch of older brothers, you learn to keep a poker face real quick if you don’t want to keep losing your allowance as soon as you get it, so I doubt if Underwood saw any change of expression other than polite interest.

But if Dixie and Pell had gone to Chan’s house and if anything had been taken, I had a feeling that I knew what it was.