Killer Market dk-5

by Margaret Maron

  “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?

  14

  « ^ » “Such industry tends towards introducing union and the mutual sympathy of a common destiny among mankind in the place of the jealousies and isolations which have hitherto marked the progress of humanity upon this planet.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

  It was nearly eleven before the last visitor left and I was still on the shadowy porch, by then half drowsing beneath a Peruvian shawl on Pell’s wicker swing.

  Drew had gone back over to Dixie’s and must have left from there because she wasn’t with the others when they came to see about the girls.

  “You might as well let Shirley Jane stay over,” Dixie told the Ragsdales as they settled wearily into wicker chairs. “Lynnette’s spent the night here before so it wouldn’t feel strange to her if she should wake up. You don’t mind, do you, Pell?”

  Pell made a murmur of assent from the other end of the swing.

  “He’s very good with children,” said Dixie.

  “I’m sure,” said Millie’s husband.

  Two clipped syllables, but they told me everything I needed to hear about Quentin Ragsdale’s opinion of homosexuals.

  “We’ll go on to Chan’s house,” said Millie. “It’s not all that far and I have a key.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Dixie protested. “It’s fifteen miles. You and Quentin can have the guest room, Shirley Jane and Lynnette can sleep in my room if you want her near you and I’ll take the couch.”

  I gathered by this that the California decorina had probably found a bed somewhere with a more partylike atmosphere.

  “Thank you,” said Millie, “but I really think we’d all be more comfortable if Quentin and I took the girls and went over there. Besides, I’ll need to look through Chan’s papers and see about transferring Lynnie’s school records.”

  “School records?” asked Pell.

  “I know it’s late in the year, but the quicker we can get her settled into her new school, the easier it’ll be on her.”

  “Wait a minute!” said Dixie. “What the L-M-N are you talking about? You’re not taking Lynnette anywhere.”

  “But surely you know that Chan asked me to be her guardian if anything happened to him?”

  Pell turned to Dixie. “I thought you said Chan tore up that will.”

  “He did. Last week when he applied for passports. He was going through the papers in his lockbox, looking for Lynnette’s birth certificate. He saw how hard this move was on me and asked if I’d feel better about things if he made me her guardian. And then he took out the envelope that had his will in it and tore it in half.”

  “Did he make a new will?” Quentin Ragsdale asked sharply.

  “I don’t know,” Dixie said. “All I know is that he tore up the old one. I saw him.”

  “But if he didn’t make a new one, I still have the copy he sent me and he d
efinitely named me executor and guardian.” Millie gazed at Dixie with tearful defiance. “It’s what my brother wanted.”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Ragsdale,” I said, “but is your copy signed and witnessed or notarized?”

  She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. “No.”

  “Then I suggest you hire an attorney. Without a signed will, it’ll be up to the court to decide who’ll administer your brother’s estate and have guardianship of his child.”

  “Who are you?” she asked peevishly, not remembering which one I was of the many that she’d met in the past few hours. “Do we know you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “She’s my friend,” Dixie told her. “Deborah Knott. Judge Deborah Knott.”

  Quentin Ragsdale gave me an angry look. “I thought judges weren’t allowed to practice law or give legal advice.”

  I shrugged. “That wasn’t legal advice. That was just common sense.”

  “Look,” Pell said in a reasonable voice. “You people don’t want to get into a fight over Lynnette tonight, do you? You’re tired and unhappy and—”

  “And we don’t need any of your pansy platitudes,” said Ragsdale.

  “Now just a minute,” Dixie said, jumping to her feet.

  “Grandmama?” Lynnette stood at the porch door in her nightgown, barefooted, her braid half undone, sleepy-eyed and troubled. “How come everybody’s yelling?”

  “Oh, sweetie, we’re not yelling,” said Millie before Dixie could answer. She held out her arms to the child. “Not really. We’re just upset ’cause we’re missing your daddy.”

  “Me, too,” said Lynnette, who went to her and crawled willingly into her lap. Her aunt smoothed her tousled hair away from her face and rocked back and forth until everyone calmed down. Quentin, as well.

  The mild spring night worked its magic and when Pell brought a jug of rosé out to the porch, Quentin Ragsdale even accepted a glass without any homophobic hostility.

  Millie began to tell Dixie, Pell and Lynnette about some incident from Chan’s childhood and Quentin turned to me. “Judge, eh?”

  He was about my age and he cited the names of three or four attorneys or judges he had known over the years. I recognized only one, but that was evidently the right one, and I heard more about Baxter Haynes’ fraternity days at Duke than I really wanted—although it might give me some ammunition the next time we crossed paths. (Haynes is almost as ardent a Republican as I am a Democrat.)

  “You know,” he confided, “we named Evelyn and Chan in our wills as Shirley Jane’s guardians. And we told them sure when they asked if we’d take Lynnie. But none of us ever thought it’d really happen. It’s a big step, taking somebody else’s kid into your own household.”

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed.

  “Of course, she and Shirley Jane get along like sisters.”

  “But still—?”

  “Exactly!” he said and held his glass out for more wine when Pell offered it around again.

  The mild night air, the dim light, the wine—we were starting to mellow out when Detective David Underwood appeared in the alley, having deduced from Dixie’s brilliantly lit and unlocked house that she couldn’t have gone far.

  “Miss Dixie?” he called from the edge of Pell’s walk.

  “Over here, David,” she called back.

  (And why was I not surprised that she, too, was on a first-name basis with a homicide detective? Yeah, yeah. Directed Market traffic when he was in uniform. Daughter in the industry. Probably brothers and sisters and eighteen cousins, too.)

  He accepted a chair, refused wine, and pronounced himself pleased to meet the Ragsdales.

  “I’m real sorry about your brother,” he told Millie, “but we’re going to do everything we can to—”

  Dixie turned to Millie in wordless communication.

  “Come on, honey,” she said to Lynnette. “Let’s get you some milk and then back to bed, okay?”

  “Okay,” the little girl said sleepily and allowed herself to be led back to my bed where her cousin slept undisturbed.

  “Sorry,” said Detective Underwood when they had gone inside. “Guess I wasn’t thinking. It’s been a long day.”

  “Do you know who fed my brother penicillin?” Millie asked bluntly.

  “Not yet, ma’am. But don’t you worry. We’ve got the newspaper, radio and television asking folks to get in touch with us if they know anything. As many people as were in that building last night, somebody’s bound to’ve seen him.”

  Underwood was good. Despite the deep shadows here on the porch, I could see him becoming folksier and warmer by the minute and the Ragsdales were responding in kind.

  “If there’s anything we can do,” said Millie.

  “Well, now, you were real close to him, weren’t you?” Underwood paused to let her nod vigorously. “Y’all see each other much?”

  “He and Lynnie drove up every couple of months and we talked on the phone every week. Before Evelyn died, we’d come here for Thanksgiving and they’d come to us for Christmas, or vice versa. We wanted Shirley Jane and Lynnie to love each other and be friends. I can’t have any more children and he didn’t plan to either after Evelyn died, so we wanted them to grow up like sisters.”

  “I see. And did he talk to you about his work? The people he worked with?”

  “Not really. Just that he loved it and made a good living from it.”

  “So he never mentioned any enemies?” asked Underwood as Dixie reappeared in the doorway.

  “Never. He got along good with everyone, so far as I know.”

  Neither Pell nor Dixie was rude enough to snort at that, but I saw Millie looking at me suspiciously, as if she could hear my eyebrows lift in the darkness.

  “Of course, there might have been girlfriends. Before he married Evelyn, he used to have three or four at a time fighting over him.” She said it admiringly, as if vicariously proud of her brother’s affairs.

  “So he was one of those,” sniffed my internal preacher. “A man who bragged about his sexual conquests.”

  The pragmatist shrugged. “Human nature, and what else is new?”

  “Since Evelyn died—”

  She broke off abruptly and stared at me with wide eyes. “Deborah Knott! Now I remember. You’re Miss Barbara’s niece. Well, I’ll be darned. I always used to wonder and of course, I couldn’t ask her.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “About the baby. Did you have it or did you get an abortion?”

  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.