Killer Market

21

« ^ » “The rage for old furniture not only occasions a demand, at most extravagant prices, for genuine articles of undoubted antiquity, but has led to a revival of some old styles, and to very successful imitations.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

The dinner party broke up a little after ten.

Outside the restaurant, we thanked Judge Simmard for a delightful and delicious dinner and waited while he hydraulically hoisted himself and his chair into his van.

The April evening had turned too chilly to linger on the sidewalk after he’d driven away. Lester Craft said goodnight and headed for his own car in the Radisson parking garage and, to my surprise, boisterous Bob and quiet Nancy went off together.

The Pattersons were going on to a private party at the Emerywood Country Club and insisted that the hosts “would be delighted if you and Mr. Han came with us.”

But Albert Han had a car and driver idling at the curb and he wanted to go dancing at a lounge over in Greensboro.

The Pattersons accepted my regrets with polite regrets of their own and departed. Han was a little harder to dissuade. For all his western dress and speech, he seemed to have rather eastern ideas about women and I finally had to speak quite sharply before I finally convinced him that I was not a party favor thoughtfully provided by Judge Simmard.

I didn’t want to party or dance. I wanted to go sit quietly and consider all the things I’d seen and heard these last two days.

Driving back to Dixie’s house, I gave serious thought to Drew Patterson. Certainly she could have given Chan those penicillin-dusted brownies even though she claimed she hadn’t known how serious his allergies were. She said Chan was merely an old friend who had treated her like a kid sister, but had been fun to play with. Dixie said she’d wanted to marry him, but Dixie seemed to see would-be stepmothers to Lynnette at every turn.

Yet, say it was true. Nevertheless, even if Drew had been head over heels for Chan, was his leaving High Point without her motive enough for murder? In this day and age, are there really women who tell themselves, “If I can’t have him, no one will?”

Then there was all that love and pride the Pattersons had invested in their only child.

Dixie thought Jay Patterson was angry at Chan because Chan was leaving Fitch and Patterson, going to Malaysia, and perhaps taking with him valuable proprietary information about Fitch and Patterson business deals. But what if he’d also come to believe that Chan had trifled with his daughter’s affections? An aggressive, pugnacious man like Patterson—

“An aggressive, pugnacious man would have punched him in the nose and been done with it,” said the pragmatist in my mental ear.

On the other hand, as Chan’s employer, he might have known how serious Chan’s allergies were.

And Savannah seemed to trust Patterson. He had helped her take food at the ALWA party Thursday night and he might have seen me pick up that baggie from the floor, the one with my fingerprints all over it. I tried to remember if that baggie was still on the table when first Savannah, then Patterson and finally Drew walked away from the table, but it was just an insignificant little plastic bag and I had absolutely no memory one way or the other.

Dixie said Lavelle Trocchi had been there. She was accused of being Chan’s dupe, of letting him steal a preview catalog of her company’s new designs. She could be fired, her reputation within the industry destroyed. I suppose she could have heard the byplay on the brownies and seen me pick up the baggie.

No one mentioned seeing the Colliers, though. And while those two retailers—Kay Adams and Poppy Jackson—might cheerfully poison Chan, would they have known penicillin would do the trick and would Chan have taken brownies from them?

More to the point, would Savannah have given any of those people my tote bag?

Heather McKenzie said Savannah had immediately disappeared into the bowels of the building.

If Ms. McKenzie could be believed.

But she had followed right on Savannah’s heels. And for a reporter, she showed a singular disinterest in Chan’s death. Was that her way of averting suspicion? Or was it merely further proof that she wasn’t really a reporter?

“Are you finished?” asked the preacher. “Or are you finally going to admit that Dixie Babcock has the strongest reasons to want Chan Nolan dead? She was there at the table with both the baggie and brownies, she knew that penicillin would kill him, AND she had the opportunity when he came to her floor.”

But I was with her that night at the hospital. Her grief. Her bewilderment. Surely her reactions were real.

“A woman you haven’t seen in ten years? How do you know she’s not capable of faking grief and bewilderment?”

He was right. I didn’t.

All the same—

Dixie was in nightgown and robe when I got back to the house. I found her in the living room amid a stack of those family albums.

“My dad’s aunt was devoted to genealogy,” she said as she reshelved the bulging scrapbooks. “Spent the last twenty years of her life trying to account for every leaf and twig on the family tree. When she died, she left all her research to me. For some reason, Lynnette’s fascinated by the family stories. She’d rather hear about a great-grandfather milking cows or how his mother shot a copperhead than any regular bedtime storybook.”

“So she wasn’t stolen by the Ragsdales and forced across state lines to Maryland?”

Dixie gave a sheepish smile. “Okay, so maybe I overreacted.”

Her chestnut hair gleamed in the lamplight. “How was Noble’s? What did you have to eat?”

“Grilled chicken with lemon and watercress. It was wonderful. Interesting conversation, too,” I said and described the table. “It was too crowded to say much to the robotics man, but it’s such a bizarre concept when you think about it.”

“Think about what?”

“Well, take stressing, for instance. They used to have a guy at the factory who would bang up new furniture to make it look old, right?”

She nodded. “Only it’s called distressing.”

“So he’d spend day after day distressing this new wood: gouging it, banging it with pipes and hammers, nicking the edges, the whole nine yards. Now he’s been replaced by a robot that’ll do the exact same thing. You could say that a man’s been put out of work by an artificial intelligence, except that the work he was doing was artificial to begin with. His fake marks were random though, and customers, according to Bob, want the exact same thing they see in the store. If there’s a wormhole three inches in on the floor model, they want theirs to have the wormhole three inches in. I mean, robots are faking something fake to begin with and then standardizing it?”

Dixie grinned. “What’s your point here, Knott?”

“The point is, you could probably buy original antiques for about the same as you’d pay for high-end reproductions.”

“Real antiques? Someone else’s castoffs? My dear, you don’t know where they’ve been. Reproductions are new. Sanitary!”

Albert Han and his after-dinner persistence made her laugh. “I don’t know if special pains are being taken for the Chinese, but when the Japanese first started coming to Market, some of the exhibitors wondered if they ought to supply geishas. Actually, I think a couple of them did. An American version anyhow.”

“I wonder if some of those hostesses working the hospitality rooms will show up in my courtroom this week.”

“Not this week. The police usually do a sweep the week before Market and they’ll do another the week after Market, but during Market? Huh-uh.”

I stepped out of my high heels and perched on the arm of the couch. “Changing the subject, what’s your take on Heather McKenzie?”

“That reporter? Seems like a nice kid, why? Was she there tonight?”

“No, but the editor of Furniture/Today was and guess what? He kept saying he didn’t have a reporter by that name.”

“So?” She shoved the last of the albums back into its slot “I bet the guy from Home-Lite in New Jersey doesn’t know he’s got a sales rep named Jacki Sotelli. People shuffle badges like cards.”

“Maybe. But when I mentioned that she was down from Massachusetts, he suddenly remembered who she really is. He tried to cover, but it was clear she’s not on his payroll.“ Dixie sat on the couch with her knees drawn up to her chin and her feline eyes were thoughtful. ”So who’s payroll is she on and why are they so interested in Savannah?”

We mulled it over a while, then Dixie said goodnight—“Lynnette will be up at first light”—and I toddled off to the guest room where I lay awake another hour trying to make some sense of things.

It kept circling back to Savannah, her delusions about Drew, her instability that began—

Sudden illumination pierced the darkness. Not for nothing had I sat in all those sessions of traffic court since coming to the bench.

Pell and Dixie and Jay Patterson, too—all agreed that the first major manifestation of Savannah’s bipolar disorder was when she destroyed her Porsche with a sledgehammer and then disappeared for nearly two years.

What if that sudden, violent destruction had been to hide evidence of a hit-and-run? When seventeen-year-old Drew was at the wheel?

The trouble, of course, was that I didn’t have enough facts. I really needed to ask David Underwood some questions, even though I didn’t have much hope that he’d answer.