As I described my adventure at the Stanberry Collection, Pell poured coffee, a rich dark roast, and smeared a stack of hot toasted muffins with cream cheese and a drizzle of honey. It was a perfect snack for that time of night and I bit into it gratefully as conversation looped from Chan, to the Market, back to how to tell Lynnette that her daddy had died.
“The exhibit next to Swingtyme had potted azaleas around their doorway,” Dixie said. “Maybe a bee stung him. Or a spider. If only I hadn’t left!”
“Or if I’d come back a few minutes earlier,” I said, knowing I’d forever wonder if those few minutes would have made much difference.
We told Pell how I’d lost my purse and keys and he seemed interested in every detail of my bizarre encounter with the legendary Savannah.
“That’s where I’ve seen you!” I exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to think why you look so familiar. I saw a picture tonight of you with Savannah and Jay Patterson.”
“I know the picture,” he said. ‘Taken down at Mulholland. She’s had studio and office space there from the beginning even though she’s always worked freelance. We were on several projects together and she taught me a lot. Brilliant lady. Unstable, of course, but brilliant as hell. Right up to the time she smashed her car.”
“Jay Patterson said something about that tonight—that Drew was nearly killed? They were in a car wreck?”
“No wreck,” he answered sardonically. “Drew was driving and dented the fender or something and Savannah took a sledgehammer out of Mulholland’s toolroom and smashed forty thousand dollars of chrome and steel to Porsche hell.”
“But why?”
He shrugged. “Probably for the same reason she flushed a ruby solitaire down a toilet or dumped the Zavala account just when they were going to launch a new national campaign based on her ideas.”
“Poor Drew. She must have felt awful.”
“Maybe. It was nothing to do with her though. Not really. I think Savannah was mad at her insurance company.”
While we talked, Dixie toyed with her toasted muffin until it lay in a hundred crumbs on her plate. Occasionally she would turn another leaf in her address book as she searched through the slips of paper and miscellaneous business cards she had jammed in helter-skelter without any consideration of alphabetizing. Eventually she found Chan’s sister’s phone number.
“It’s awfully late. Maybe I should wait till morning? But what if she’s gone to work when I call? I don’t have a clue where that is.”
Pell picked up the phone that was hanging on the wall beside her. “You’re procrastinating, Dix.”
“But a phone call at this hour of the night? She’ll think it’s bad news.”
“It
Reluctantly, she took the phone he held out and began to dial. We heard one ring and then an answering machine clicked in and Dixie immediately hung up.
“How the L-M-N can I leave her a message like that?”
“So ask her to call you back,” he said inexorably.
It wasn’t long after she’d done so that I began suppressing one yawn after another.
“I’ve got a spare toothbrush if Dix will lend you a gown,” said Pell, and soon I was trailing him out the back door, across the narrow cul-de-sac and into his own kitchen, an eclectic space that mixed antique utensils with high-tech equipment. When I remarked on the display, he pointed to a cast-iron apple corer and said, “Savannah gave me the first piece. It’s nineteenth-century.”
The cabinets were painted a rich dark red and the leaded glass doors were beveled and then etched with art deco designs.
The rest of the house was dark and I was too sleepy to want a tour, especially since his guest room was right next to the kitchen.
I accepted towels, availed myself of the toothbrush, thanked him again for his kindness and had just switched off the lamp (two large white glass calla lilies held in the arms of a bronze woodland nymph) when I heard the back door open again. The window blinds weren’t quite closed and I saw Pell cross the cul-de-sac and again enter Dixie’s house.
I supposed this meant that they wanted to talk without a semi-stranger like me around but I was too tired to get my feelings hurt.
The bed was too soft and tended to lump in the middle. Nevertheless, I fit my body around the lumps and slept until bright headlights raked the room sometime later.
I sat up groggily, urgently needing to use the bathroom after so much coffee but too disoriented at first to remember exactly where it was.
Through the half-opened blind, I saw the headlights of a van go dark, then Pell and Dixie were silhouetted against the lights of her house. He put his arms around her and she briefly laid her head on his shoulder before they moved apart.
A moment later, she entered her house and I heard Pell quietly open and close the kitchen door before passing down the hall outside my room.
I tiptoed to the bathroom and back and was still so sleep-drugged that the lumpy mattress could have been a Coley Bridge Deluxe Air Foam for all I noticed.
8
