Killer Market

17

« ^ » “The term ‘furniture, ’ which means nearly every article and utensil of household use, is so comprehensive that it includes many things which have been described in detail elsewhere in this volume.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

Since Savannah’s movements Thursday night held the key to Chan’s death, finding her seemed to be our first logical step. For all my theorizing with Drew Patterson last night, misplaced maternalism hardly seemed a valid motive for murder, even assuming Savannah wasn’t cooking on all four burners. We needed to know when she left my bag at the Swingtyme showroom and who else was there at the time.

“I know she worked at your design studio,” I told Pell, “but where did she live?”

“Furnished apartments all over the area. I don’t think she ever cared about stuff beyond her cars, a few clothes and maybe jewelry. She kept most of her books and personal papers down at the studio. Said she didn’t trust nosy landladies with no lives of their own not to come snooping.”

He looked up her last address and the three of us drove over to Jerilyn Street and talked to the owner of a furnished garage apartment, a woman in her twenties who couldn’t have had a spare moment to snoop. Not with three children under the age of four and, from the looks of her swollen belly, another due any minute.

“The police were here yesterday asking about her,” said young Mrs. Eakes, balancing a baby on one hip and using the other hip to keep a toddler corralled on the porch. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. She wasn’t well, poor thing, and her daddy sent somebody up here to bring her home. It was right before Stephanie Leigh was born—’bout a year and a half ago? Anyhow, I’ve not seen or heard a word from her since I shipped her things down to Athens, Georgia, like her daddy asked me to.”

The efficiency apartment was now rented to a college student who was waxing his car in the driveway. “Now that you mention it, there was an old lady came by right after winter break. Said she used to live here, wanted to see if any of her stuff was still here. Seemed harmless enough, so I let her look.”

“Was there anything?” I asked, resisting the urge to buff a spot he’d missed.

“Just a little cushion.” He measured a twelve-inch square with his hands. “Black velvet with gold tassels in each corner. Wasn’t anything I used and Frances—Mrs. Eakes—wasn’t here to ask, so I let her take it.”

Underwood had told me that Savannah still had work space at Mulholland and that he was going to put the building under surveillance. I was on the middle seat behind Pell and Dixie as he finished circling the block and again turned his blue van off Main Street onto Mulholland. I didn’t see a soul that looked like a police officer.

Traffic was thick and parking spaces around the design studio were at a premium. While Pell maneuvered into the employees’ lot, Dixie and I craned our necks trying to spot a car with someone sitting motionless. On television, the surveillance people are always digging up the streets, stringing telephone wires or staked out in a van with dark windows.

Not here.

No workmen, no smoked windows, and all the cars looked empty.

“Maybe they’re watching from inside one of the surrounding buildings.”

“Look around you, Deborah,” Dixie said dryly. “Do you see any windows overlooking this entrance?”

She had a point. I could see a corner of GHFM, but no windows broke its exterior walls. The same was true of smaller showroom buildings that backed onto this block. Glitter and shine might fill those endless interiors, yet none of it came from natural sunlight.

Pell parked in his assigned slot in front of an inconspicuous rear door and I realized that I must have passed the Mulholland Design Studio a half-dozen times this weekend without noticing it.

Not that they were trying to keep their location secret. The name was carved on a low stone slab next to Mulholland Street, and the stone slab sat amid a narrow strip of evergreens with a thick border of bright yellow pansies running around the whole thing. But the block-square building itself could have been a tobacco warehouse for all the care that had been taken with its design: four windowless cement walls painted mud brown and a pitched roof sheeted in what looked like ordinary barn tin.

Hard to believe that ads for some of the glossiest magazines in the world were shot right here in this building.

Or to realize that a home furnishings revolution had started here when a brilliant young designer made eclecticism a household word.

“Thirty years ago, furniture was still being sold in rigidly matched suites,” Pell told me. “Your mother wore matched cardigan sets, right?”

I nodded as he expected me to.

“So did mine. So did Dix’s. Handbags coordinated with her shoes, right?”

Again I nodded dutifully.

“Same with furniture. Chairs matched tables that matched sideboards which matched china closets. Beds, dressers, and bedside tables—all part of a perfect matched set. If there was a candlestick lamp on one end table, it was balanced by an identical candlestick lamp on the opposite end table. If your couch was upholstered in striped satin, so were the side chairs, and chances are that your satin drapes would be a solid version of the dominant color as well.”

“Savannah changed all that?”

Pell slid back my door and gave me his hand as I stepped down from the van. “Savannah changed all that. Put the word ‘eclectic’ on everyone’s lips. It was before my time, of course, when Mulholland Studio was only a quarter of the size it is now. I got here ten years later but everyone was still talking about the way she turned things upside down. She was a Sixties Happening right here in High Point. She bought her clothes at a thrift shop, did what she wanted, said what she wanted and made everyone want that look, that style. She used it to talk her way into old Mack Keehbler’s office.”

“Keehbler Couches?” I asked, remembering that his was one of the power names Dixie had linked with Savannah’s.

“And case goods,” said Dixie, who must have known the story by heart.

Pell unlocked the studio door and we walked into another of those drab concrete corridors so at odds with the glitz and glamour of the industry when on display.

“So Keehbler sent over two suites,” said Pell. “A bedroom and a living room, and she mixed them like two decks of playing cards. A bedside table became an end table for the couch. She hung the dresser mirror over the sideboard, put the coffee table at the foot of the bed for a dressing bench, and instead of matching lamps, silver cigarette boxes and neat little bouquets of flowers, she rummaged in the junk shops for off-the-wall accessories: funky lamps, painted boxes, antique toys, a wall display of old hand mirrors.”

“And Keehbler loved the ad she created for him?” I asked.

“Hated it!” Pell said cheerfully. “But Victoria Cumbee of Ashenhurst saw a copy in his wastebasket and hired her on the spot to style their new fall catalog. The rest is history.”

He opened a door at the end of the corridor and I caught my breath in astonishment.

Outside, the place had looked like a warehouse; inside, the resemblance was even stronger. Row after long row of eight-foot-tall gray steel shelves met our eyes and each orderly shelf was full of stuff.

At the door where we’d entered, the subject was candlesticks. I hadn’t considered there could be that many different kinds of candlesticks in the world: eight-branched silver candelabras, tall silver, short silver, simple and severe, heavy and ornate, delicate for slender tapers, chunky for thicker candles. And after all the changes had been rung in silver, you had the same thing again in brass, pewter, wood, cast iron, tin, glass of all colors, porcelain, ceramics and crystal. Shelf after shelf after shelf.

There were shelves of cats and dogs of all sizes and all materials; twenty feet of antique painted iron, mechanical banks and toys; a section devoted to teddy bears of graduated sizes and all periods; another to boxes made of wood, paper, leather, metal, glass, marble or plastic, from matchboxes to painted breadboxes; yet another held bowls, from simple Revere silver to reproductions of Chinese porcelain. I saw old-fashioned wind-up clocks, Seth Thomas grandmother clocks, plastic dogs with clock faces for bellies, and even a few hourglasses. Taller shelves held the studio’s extensive collection of table lamps (floor lamps stood in serried ranks along a far wall). Baskets, picture frames, vases, fire screens, books bound in colorful leathers, switehplates, bottles, silk flowers—I was already dizzy from looking at it all when Dixie touched my arm and said, “Look up.”

Hanging from the rafters fifteen feet above our heads was a forest of light fixtures and paddle fans, swinging lamps and chandeliers of faceted crystal, massive wrought iron, polished brass, cartwheels, even a chandelier fashioned from deer horns, which in turn brought us to a macabre section of stuffed animals, fish and mounted trophies.

The aisles were barely wide enough for two persons to pass and as I followed Pell and Dixie through the maze, a woman turned into our aisle pushing a wire shopping cart piled high with miscellaneous articles which she was returning to their proper spaces after a camera shoot. We had to flatten along the side to let her pass.

“Hi, Pell,” she said, holding up a small iron pot “Where do you think it ought to go? Vases or iron cookwares? Jordan used it for dried hydrangeas but I don’t know where she got it and she won’t be back till after Market.”

He upended the pot. “What does the tag say?”

“No tag,” she said. “It must have fallen off.”

“Then I’d stick it in cookwares,” he advised.

“Yeah, that’s the logical place, isn’t it?”

As the woman trundled away with her cart, Pell said, “Before Savannah, design studios wouldn’t have a tenth of these props. She put Mulholland on the map and they should have given her a share of the business.”

We were interrupted by a very tall, very thin young man, who had spotted us from the end of a distant hall.

“Sst! Pell!” he hissed. “Hurry up, they’re waiting for you.”

“Oh, God,” Pell groaned, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “I forgot all about the reception this afternoon.”

“Start SMart’s new art director’s been asking for you for the last twenty minutes. She’s furious,” the young man said in a strident whisper.

“Give her another glass of Rioja and tell her I’ll be right there.” He handed Dixie his key ring, then smoothed his hair again and straightened his vest and shirtsleeves. “You remember where Savannah’s office was? Around the corner from mine, up on the second floor? This key ought to fit.”

“Go!” said Dixie. “We’ll find it.”

Once he’d left us though, Dixie looked around hesitantly. “I haven’t been down here since Evelyn died,” she said, “and they were always moving the interior walls, but I think…”

We turned a corner past a huge stack of colorful carpets in a range of patterns from Persian to English cottage, and I had to watch my step. The space was cavernous, the fixed cement walls were painted light-absorbing black and the floor was crisscrossed with electrical cords that snaked around flimsy temporary walls to portable floodlights, power tools and various appliances.

I heard someone using an electric saw and the smell of wet latex paint hung in the air.

We passed sets in various stages of completion. On one, an elderly black man was carefully assembling a red vacuum cleaner that would be photographed against this scrap of deep blue carpet like a ruby in a blue velvet box.

Another set held a bedroom that looked ready to shoot. Even the camera was in place. Everything that the camera might see was brilliantly lit and as pristine as the set’s new coat of paint Two feet out of camera range though and it was back to darkness, shabby and ordinary. The bed was dressed in gorgeous linens, but when we walked around to view it from the other side, I saw that the comforter that looked so lavish from the front barely covered the back edge and that where a leg was missing, someone had substituted a gallon paint bucket.

It was like being backstage at a Broadway show, viewing the scenery from behind. The degree of clutter around the edges was astonishing and the corners were stacked deep in what seemed to be bolts of cloth, old pipes, broken light stands, scrap lumber and odd sizes of sheetrock.

“Umm. Nice kitchen,” I said, pausing at yet another tableau that looked camera ready to my untrained eye. The modern cabinets glistened as did the place-settings of potteryware in an eclectic mix of primary colors. A sleek stainless steel chandelier hung over the breakfast table. At least it was sleek as far as the camera would notice. A few feet up, just out of the camera’s field of vision, the shiny steel rod became a utilitarian cable.

“What do you suppose the product is?” Dixie asked me. “Appliances, breakfast set, or lighting fixtures?”

“The ceramic dishes,” I answered promptly.

“Wrong,” said a half-familiar voice behind us. “It’s the vinyl floor tiles.”

I turned and there from my courtroom yesterday was young Randy Verlin all togged out in jeans, scuffed work shoes and a very professional-looking tool belt.

“Oh,” he said. “Judge Knott. Sorry. I didn’t recognize you, ma’am, without your robe. You know, I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but I sure do appreciate what you did. Giving me Travis and all.”

He twisted a screwdriver in his hands. “And I’m gonna try real hard to do like you said, all that about not bad-mouthing April Ann to him.”

“That’s good,” I said warmly.

“I gotta tell you though. When I seen that you were a woman, I thought for sure you’d give him to her, but you made a believer out of me.”

“Thank you,” I said, choosing to take this as the compliment he obviously intended. “So this is where you work?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Great, maybe you can help us.” I turned to Dixie. “Where exactly do we want to go?”

“I’m completely turned around,” she told him, smiling. “Where do y’all keep your stairs these days?”

“Oh, you must have passed them on your way in here.”

He led us back the way we’d come to the stack of carpets. “Just on the other side of that wall there.”

We circled around and Dixie stopped short. Blood drained from her face. “Oh, God!” she whispered.

It stood alone in the center of an empty space—a graceful, sinuous flight of steps that snaked up to nowhere.

“I’ll be happy to move it for you,” said Randy Verlin.

He kicked off a brake and tugged at the lower rail. The fifteen-foot-tall staircase moved smoothly on ball-bearing casters.

“Where do you want it?” he asked Dixie, and I realized that he must have assumed she was on Mulholland’s staff.

“No,” I said sharply. “She meant the stairs to the second floor.”

By now, Verlin had caught on that something was very wrong, though he wasn’t quite sure what.

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought—But you want to go upstairs, right?”

“Right.”

He pointed. “Down to the next opening and bear left.”

Dixie strode off as I thanked a puzzled Randy Verlin and hurried after her.

The stairs to the second floor were of ordinary industrial steel, painted bright red. Dixie was almost at the top before I caught up.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, but as soon as I touched her arm, she turned to me in tears.

I held her till she stopped shaking, then offered tissues from my purse.

“Sorry. Each time, I keep thinking this will be the last time I cry for Evelyn. And then something like this will hit me in the face and I fall apart all over again.”

She needed to put cold water on her eyes. There was a women’s room halfway down the hall, but it was locked and the second floor seemed deserted.

“Never mind,” said Dixie. “I think Savannah’s studio had a lavatory attached to it. If hers doesn’t, Pell’s does and one of these keys is bound to unlock his door.”

Pell had said that Savannah’s studio space was around the corner from his but the hall seemed to dead-end in a tangle of cast-off furniture. Yet, when we looked closer, we saw that it was possible to snake through the clutter and turn the corner.

As expected, the door was locked, but the second key that Dixie tried unlocked it. It took her a moment to find the light switch.

When the lights flooded on, we saw a large room, about twenty feet square, complete with drawing table, file cabinets, chairs, a cabinet full of colored inks and drawing pens. The Persian rug on the floor looked authentic and the prints that hung beside the door had been professionally framed by someone who valued them. Bookshelves ranged along one wall and were jammed tight with both books and loose-leaf notebooks. The ceiling followed the slant of the roof and the short wall held a full-length mirror framed in heavy ornate gilt.

A corkboard covered one whole wall from floor to ceiling and was thick with sketches, ads, old photographs, and scraps of papers with phone numbers, names, addresses and memos that had been hastily jotted down. All were dusty and curling at the edges.

Dixie peered inside the adjoining lavatory and ran her fingers lightly over the sink. “Dry,” she said, “but it doesn’t feel dusty.”

Yet the office itself had a neglected, abandoned air and had clearly not been cleaned in months.

The industrial-size wire wastebasket held candy wrappers, crumpled potato chip bags and wadded-up sketches of chests and chairs, but they could have been there for ages.

As Dixie splashed cold water on her face and freshened her lipstick, I smoothed out some of the sketches. Knowing nothing about furniture styles, I couldn’t tell if these were new or from a past season. But then I smoothed another sheet and saw two unmistakable faces. Drew might not have changed much in eighteen months, but Lynnette’s snaggle-toothed smile was quite recent.

“Look,” I said as Dixie emerged from the lavatory.

“This was hanging behind the door,” she said at the same moment.

It was a new green nylon tote bag with the logo of a waterbed company, identical to the one those Southern belles at Market Square had given Lynnette yesterday.