supposed to say ‘And by the way, your son-in-law tried to get in my pants when I was going through a rough time in my life’? I wasn’t being secretive, Dixie. Honest. It just seemed so irrelevant”
She paused with Chan’s toothbrush, dental floss and razor in her hand. “But after he died—?”
“It was still irrelevant. And a complication I don’t need.” I smoothed the sheets and reached for a fresh pillowcase. “Now I’ve got to go down to Underwood’s office tomorrow and spend a couple of hours convincing him that I didn’t bear Chan’s love child and then murder him twenty years after the non-fact.”
“Serves you right,” she said tartly, and I knew that at least one person believed me.
She cut those slanted, catlike eyes at me. “Heavy breathing, huh?”
I threw the pillow at her.
We were both tired, but too wound up for sleep, so Dixie found an open bottle of white wine in her refrigerator and we carried our glasses into the living room, a room that was warm and inviting and personalized with family photographs, keepsakes and a shelf full of bulging scrapbooks. We curled up at either end of the long couch and played “Whatever Happened to What’s Her Name?” for a while until talk drifted into more personal channels.
I told her about Kidd. She told me about an intense affair that had ended in rancor shortly before Evelyn’s death and how she thought she’d maybe just quit trying. “But I met someone down at the Tupelo Market in February. Tom’s not handsome, but he’s awfully nice. He acts as if I’m special—”
“As well he should,” I murmured.
“—and he makes me laugh.”
We agreed that laughter was important.
“What about Pell?” I asked when we’d thoroughly dissected Dixie’s love life. “I don’t see any signs that he’s sharing his house with anyone.”
She sighed and shook her head. “You don’t know what a hellish two years it’s been. First we lost Evelyn and then we lost James.”
“He and Pell?”
She nodded. “He was an investment broker. Knew the stock market like I know High Point Thanks to him, Pell and I both have solid investment programs.”
She half knelt on the couch to pluck a small framed photograph from the collection on the table behind us. It showed Pell and another man head-to-head in an affectionately clowning pose.
“To look at James, you’d think he was gray tweed, button-down collars and all business. You’ve seen Pell’s living room?”
I smiled.
“Yeah. Well, James was the one who found the boa constrictor and he was the one who put sunglasses on the Nubian slave boys. They were together for eight years.”
“Why did they break up?”
“They didn’t. He died last summer.”
“Oh, Dixie!” Apprehension touched my heart as I asked the inevitable question. “AIDS?”
She shook her head. “Pancreatic cancer. Thirty-nine days after he was diagnosed, he was dead.”
We had another glass of wine and eventually our talk wound back to Savannah, and I described for Dixie my impression of the picture in Heather McKenzie’s car. “She really looked like a dynamo. I would imagine
Dixie sipped her wine reflectively. “At one time or another, I’ve heard her linked with everybody from Mack Keehbler and Jay Patterson to Jacob Collier and—”
“Jacob Collier?”
“Oh yes. Jacob may be pushing eighty but the man’s a billy goat with monkey glands.”
I had to laugh at the image that conjured up, and remembering the snippet of gossip I’d overheard at the Discovery Center, I said, “I guess Chan thought his sex life undercut his effectiveness as a salesman.”
“Come again?”
“I heard someone say Chan was annoyed about Collier’s heavy dating.”
Dixie leaned back against the burgundy velvet cushions and laughed so hard that her eyes disappeared into slanted crinkles.
“What?” I said, kicking her with my stockinged feet. “What’s so funny?”
“You. You don’t have a clue as to what heavy dating is, do you?”
“If it’s that funny, I guess I don’t.”
“Actually,” she said, sobering up, “it’s not all that funny. Not for Jacob Collier. Heavy dating got him in trouble all right, but it has nothing to do with his sexual proclivities. See, dating is the number of days a sales rep will give a retailer to pay off the sale, usually in increments of thirty: thirty, sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty, or two-forty. Chan was going over some of Jacob’s accounts and saw that he’d given Kay Adams and Poppy Jackson datings of two hundred and forty days on a half-million of goods. That’s incredible these days. It’s like turning Fitch and Patterson into a personal loan banker, which is another reason why Chan was going to pull their business. They keep too much inventory on hand and they rely too much on heavy dating instead of turning the merchandise over. More aggressive businesses depend on smaller inventories, better management, jazzier sales techniques, et cetera for quick turn-arounds.
That I could understand. “And what’s the Golden Egg?”
Dixie smiled. “It’s what sales people call this territory. North Carolina not only has some of the biggest retailers
