Killer Market

16

« ^ » “The pieces of mechanism used to measure time, and kept in motion by gravity through the medium of weights, or by the elastic force of a spring, are called time pieces, or clocks..”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

I drove back to Dixie’s house with as much ambivalence about facing her as I’d had about facing Underwood earlier.

Golden-bell forsythias and borders of bright tulips marched along the residential streets. Each yard seemed massed in red, pink and white azaleas and dogwoods spread their graceful branches of white blossoms everywhere I turned.

The blue-sky morning was so beautiful that I was filled with a sudden longing for Kidd. It was a day made for horseback riding or canoeing or for just taking a rambling walk through a spring landscape of newly leafed maples, oaks and flowering Judas trees. Not that Kidd was even in North Carolina this weekend, having gone down to the Georgia sea islands for something to do with sea turtles, but it was pleasant to daydream about alternatives to furniture and murder.

Evidently, the Ragsdales felt the same way, for when I got back to the cul-de-sac off Johnson Street, they were there to pick up Lynnette for the day.

“Try to guess who/ is going to the zoo?” she chanted as I walked up.

“What a great idea,” I said, half wishing the Ragsdales were friends who would invite me along.

Our state zoo is state of the art, the first natural-habitat zoo in the country, with restraints on human visitors but few visible ones on the wild animals. Located in Asheboro, at the northern tip of the Uwharrie National Forest, the zoo sits very close to the geographical center of the state, which means that it’s only about a half hour or so southeast of High Point.

“Say hello/ to the buffalo,” I told Lynnette as she and Shirley Jane, who seemed like a nice kid, buckled up in the backseat.

“But don’t say boo/ to the kangaroo,” Dixie called from the doorway.

The car pulled slowly away from the curb and we heard the girls’ alternating giggles as they tried to stump each other:

“Grizzly bear?”

“Please don’t stare. Antelope?”

“You’re a dope!”

It was just as well I hadn’t been invited, I decided. Not even the zoo was worth thirty minutes of nonstop nonsense rhymes by a pair of wound-up monkeys.

Inside Dixie’s kitchen—surprisingly plain-vanilla, I realized now, with nothing but purple floor tiles to break the monotony of white cabinets and fixtures—Pell Austin was loading her dishwasher with dirty dishes from the late brunch they had just eaten.

“Did you eat?”

He held out a box of Krispy-Kreme doughnuts, the most delicately delicious doughnuts in the whole world. They’re made fresh at least twice a day and when you bite into one so hot that the glaze hasn’t yet set, you think you’ve died and gone to heaven.

“Just coffee and a banana from Dixie’s fruit bowl,” I said, and yielded to temptation. Even cold, a Krispy-Kreme doughnut is like eating yeasty ambrosia.

“I heard they opened a shop in Manhattan last year,” Pell said, as he poured coffee for me in a mug sprigged with violets. “Maybe we ought to buy stock in it.”

He and Dixie both seemed more relaxed this morning and in better spirits.

“Did you work it out with your sister-in-law about Lynnette?” I asked.

“For the moment,” Dixie said. “Thanks for speaking up last night. I’ve agreed to let her act as Chan’s executor and she’s agreed not to try to take Lynnette before the end of school. We’re both going to speak to an attorney. I just wish you could advise me.”

“I did,” I grinned. “I told you to get a lawyer.”

“So how’d it go with David?” she asked casually. Her back was to me as she wiped down the stove.

“Fine.”

“He decide your teenage fling with Chan wasn’t relevant after all?”

She rinsed out the dishcloth, hung it to dry beneath the sink, and sat down at the white table with a tall amethyst glass of water. At least her glassware had color.

I shrugged. “Who knows? Lucky for me, he’s still looking at alternatives. Did your sister-in-law tell you that someone was over at Chan’s house Thursday night? Or rather sometime before dawn yesterday morning?”

“Chan’s been known to lend his key to out-of-town friends looking for a little privacy,” said Dixie, a little too quickly. “Millie knows that.”

“But she told Detective Underwood that nothing was out of place and nothing seems to be missing.”

Pell closed the dishwasher, turned it on, then came and joined us at the table. “Maybe they changed their minds before they got to the bedroom.”

“He made a point of asking me if you two went out again after I went to bed.”

They looked at me mutely.

“I told him the truth,” I said to Pell. “That I knew you came back over here—”

“—to get a book I’d left,” he interjected. “I told him that myself.”

“—and that I woke up when you returned but that I didn’t look at the clock and I couldn’t begin to guess what time it was.”

I could see them visibly relax.

“Well,” said Dixie.

She started to rise, but I motioned for her to stay.

“I did not tell him that what woke me up was Pell’s van lights when you two drove in.”

Instant tension.

“You knew that Chan’s will named his sister as Lynnette’s guardian, so you drove over there, rifled his lockbox and took the will, right? Please tell me you didn’t destroy it?”

“Actually,” Pell began hesitantly.

“No, Pell!” said Dixie. Her tip-tilted eyes flashed brown sparks.

I held up my hand. “On second thought, forget about it. I don’t want to know. In fact, I don’t want to hear a word about anything that happened after I went to bed over at Pell’s. I’m an officer of the court. As far as I’m concerned, you drove out for orange juice and were back in ten minutes.”

Dixie started to speak, but I shook my head. “I mean it, Dixie. Don’t tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Me, too,” Pell said softly.

“Don’t thank me too soon. If I knew for a fact what time it was when you drove into the alley, I’d tell Underwood in a New York minute. And I’d still tell him if I thought either of you had anything to do with Chan’s death.”

“I didn’t,” Dixie told me solemnly. “Neither of us did. I swear it, Deborah.”

“Where were you Thursday night when Chan came downstairs?”

“After I finally got off the phone with Mr. Sherrin? It was around nine-thirty. I locked up, stuck a note on the door to tell you I’d be back at ten and then ran up the street to talk to Mary Ellen Hiatt, my opposite number at SHFA. We’re going to join forces with some other retail associations to lobby against lifting restrictions on selling furniture on military bases. I had just got back and was asking the guard if he’d seen you when you came charging out of the elevator.”

“So sometime between nine-thirty and ten, Chan came down and someone poisoned him with my penicillin tablets. Could Savannah know he was allergic to them?”

“Evelyn might have mentioned it to her, but I told you last night—he thought allergies were nerdy. Most people that knew him knew he had some, but I doubt if many people knew specifically what would set him off. Or how serious it was.”

“And Savannah might do crazy things,” said Pell, “but violence isn’t part of her makeup.”

“What is her makeup?” I asked. “Drew said you know what happens to her when she flips out.”

“Just the outlines, not the specifics,” he said. “They call it bipolar disorder these days, but it used to be manic-depressive psychosis. I didn’t know what the hell it was—just that there were weeks, months even, when she seemed to be flying. You would swear that she was dropping acid—she used to say that she could hear color and feel design, as if electricity flowed from her fingertips—but it wasn’t drugs. It was the way her brain was wired.”

“And when she crashed?”

“That’s when she’d disappear. I used to think she got burned out and went off on cruises or to a spa or something to recharge. I remember the first time I saw it happen, it was like watching a lightbulb on a dimmer switch, until one day I realized that she was sitting at her drawing table staring at nothing, with tears running down her face over the meaninglessness of the universe. Two days later, she disappeared.”

The memory seemed to sadden him.

“That was pretty much the pattern. She’d finish a major project; then would come a letdown, and she’d go off for a month or two. We never knew where. Eighteen months ago, though, she crashed big-time. She was so far gone, I had to violate her privacy and go through her personal papers to find the name of someone to call. Turned out to be her father down in Georgia. You want to know what his surname is? Smith.”

“You never told me that,” said Dixie. “Smith?”

“Can you believe it? Creedence Smith. He told me he was in his thirties when Savannah was born, so he’s mid-eighties. If he’s still alive. I called down there at Christmas to ask how Savannah was and was told that the phone company no longer had a listing for any Creedence Smith.”

He sighed and offered me more doughnuts. I shook my head. It’s too easy to keep reaching into the box until suddenly you realize you’ve eaten three without even noticing.

“The fact that she’s come back to High Point without telling me or anybody at Mulholland—the way you say she’s dressing and acting so weird? It makes me wonder if he died or had a stroke or something. Without any next of kin to be responsible and keep her there, maybe she checked herself out of the hospital before she was stable.”

“You say she’s never been violent?” I asked skeptically. “What about smashing her car or flushing jewelry? That sounds pretty violent to me.”

“Oh, she could get in a rage at inanimate objects,” he agreed, “but she never directed it toward people.”

“Evelyn was a little scared of her,” Dixie reminded him.

His face softened. “Only because she was in such awe of Savannah’s talents and so diffident about her own.”

Sudden tears glistened in Dixie’s eyes. “Oh, God, Pell!”

He reached across the table and patted her hand. “I know, love. I know.”

“How did she die?” I asked quietly, knowing that sometimes it helped to talk.

“She fell off the Park Avenue stairs,” she said. “Pell was there.”

“It’s what we call one of our staircases at Mulholland,” Pell explained. “It’s about fifteen feet high, very sleek and moderne, sort of a long graceful modified S-curve that’s flat on one side so that we can push it up flush against a wall, make it look as if we’re shooting in an elegant duplex apartment. Evelyn was dressing a set we were going to shoot that afternoon. A rush job. The product was a Fitch and Patterson piece, an armoire, if I remember correctly. A last-minute addition to the line.”

“A last-minute Widdicomb knock-off,” Dixie said bitterly.

“Anyhow, workmen had rolled the staircase into place but for some reason they forgot to lock the brakes, although one guy afterwards swore that he had. I was in prop storage looking for something clever to jazz up the set. Evelyn went up to hang some pictures on a wall near the top and when she started to hammer in the tacks, the stairs slid away from the wall. There was no handrailing on that side and she went right over. They hadn’t laid the rugs yet, so there was nothing to break her fall.”

“Fifteen feet onto a bare concrete floor,” said Dixie. “She died three hours later.”

Pell’s eyes were wet now, too. “A blessing really. There would have been massive brain damage if she’d lived.”

“Another two weeks and the doctors might have saved the baby,” Dixie said brokenly. “A little boy. He was just too premature to live. We buried him in her arms.”

“Oh, Dixie,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t you see, Deborah? I can’t let Millie take Lynnette. She’s all I have now.”

I nodded. “I do see. The thing is, does Underwood know you well enough to understand all this?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“Look at it from his viewpoint. You’re so frantic to keep Lynnette here, you’d do anything to stop Chan from taking her off to Malaysia.”

“Not kill!” Pell said sharply.

“So say you.” I turned back to Dixie. “A prosecutor could argue that after Heather and I left, Savannah came to your office and brought my bag, just as I first asked her to. You open it, find my tablets and a baggie full of brownies that she’s dropped inside, and realize you’ve been handed a gift. You page Chan on his beeper, meet him at the deserted Swingtyme display, offer him a brownie and voila! When he starts having trouble breathing, you tell him to lie down and you’ll go get help. Instead you rush out to your friend’s office and while he’s dying, you’re establishing an alibi.”

There was a moment of stunned silence when I finished talking. Dixie was shaking her head in denial, but Pell said,

“She’s right, Dix. They could build a case if they wanted to.”

He turned to me. “So it’s up to us to find out who really did it.”

“Us? What’s this us, white man? I’m a judge. I can’t get involved.”

“You’re already involved,” he reminded me. “Soon as you didn’t tell David Underwood we were out in my van late Thursday night, you became our accomplice.”

“Oh, Lord help us!” groaned the preacher.

“Yeah, you’d better pray,” said the pragmatist. “And while you’re at it, pray that Dwight doesn’t hear about this either.”