in the country, we also have the transshippers here. Very lucrative pickings.”
“Drew says that Tracy Collier and her dad would normally inherit her grandfather’s sales territory.”
“Was Chan going to cut into her Golden Egg?” Dixie asked maliciously. “You’d better believe it!”
“I gather you don’t like her. Because she’s ambitious?”
“I don’t mind legitimate ambition. Jacob’s made a lot of money over the years here, but he genuinely cares about my small retailers. I don’t know his son, but I do know that Tracy only cares about the money. And the power. She’s bright, she’s pretty, and she went after Chan with everything in her arsenal, including messing with Evelyn’s head. She asked Evelyn to give him a divorce. And that’s where she cut her throat with Chan. As I told you before, he might flirt around, but he loved Evelyn, wanted the marriage to work and he was so happy about the baby. After what Tracy did, her days were numbered. Chan’d already taken some of Jacob’s best accounts for the house and he planned to convert most of the rest before he went to Jacaranda. Tracy would have been lucky to have enough egg left for Sunday brunch.”
“Sounds like a motive for murder to me,” I observed.
Dixie’s feline eyes narrowed. “It does, doesn’t it? Too bad she wasn’t there when Savannah walked out with your bag.”
“But did she know Chan was that allergic to penicillin? Drew said she didn’t and she must have known him for years.”
“Allergies didn’t go with his macho image,” Dixie said. “He thought allergies were for wimps and always downplayed his. I remember last summer when we were all up at the Pattersons’ camp on Hidden Lake for the company’s annual outing. Chan was in the middle of a course of antibiotics for a root canal and he forgot to bring his pills that day. Elizabeth Patterson offered him some penicillin tablets she had left over from some minor infection or other and he said maybe it wouldn’t hurt to skip a couple of doses. She insisted until he finally admitted he had a problem with penicillin but he really didn’t like having to tell her.”
Dixie may have understood why I hadn’t mentioned knowing Chan, but by noon the next day, I began to feel that she was a distinct minority.
Before I’d even had my first cup of coffee, she called me to the telephone and there was Dwight Bryant fuming in my ear.
“What the hell’s going on up there, Deb’rah?” he asked. “I’ve just got off the phone with David Underwood for the second time in two days about you. How come you’re lying to him about that guy that got himself killed? With your penicillin tablets, too?”
“I didn’t lie,” I said stiffly.
“He sure thinks you did.”
“Okay, maybe I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I certainly didn’t lie.”
“Yeah, I know you and your maybe-I-didn’t- tell-the-whole-truth. Listen, Deb’rah. This is no joke. Yesterday morning, Underwood thought you had means and opportunity. Today, he thinks you’ve got motive, too. I’ve calmed him down a little, but quit playing games with him, okay?”
Indignation rose within me. “I’m not playing games.”
“Want me to call John Claude for you?”
“Oh, Lord, no! Don’t you dare.” That’s all I’d need. Having to explain all this to my very proper cousin, John Claude Lee, who happens to be my former law partner and current attorney? “And don’t you breathe a word about this to my daddy or Aunt Zell either, you hear?”
“Then behave yourself, okay?”
“Okay,” I said meekly.
And I really meant to.
“You told me Chan Nolan was a perfect stranger,” said Detective Underwood.
“I believe my exact words were that I didn’t go around killing perfect strangers,” I said.
“Implying that Nolan was.”
We were once again seated across from each other in one of the department’s featureless interrogation rooms, with Underwood’s well-doodled yellow legal pad between us once more. His mustache seemed shorter and neater than it had last evening and I realized that he’d had a haircut and trim this morning.
“I’m sorry you took it that way,” I apologized, resisting the temptation to smartmouth. “But for all intents and purposes, he
“If it was so insignificant, why didn’t you mention it when you had the chance?” he growled.
“For this very reason. You think I don’t know how suspicious this looks? My bag taken, my tablets used? If I told you that I’d once known Chan, this is exactly how I thought you’d react”
He leaned back in his chair and fingered his mustache as he thought about it
“I talked to the Stanberrys,” he said finally.
“Oh?”
“They say if you were faking your surprise when you pulled out that fried chicken instead of your checkbook, you ought to be on TV instead of wasting that talent on the bench.”
I felt a small trickle of relief. “Thanks… I think.”
“ ’Course, your Major Bryant tells me you’re pretty active in your local little theater down there in Dobbs.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I started to fume. And then I realized that he was laughing at me beneath that thick clump of brown hair on his upper lip.
