“I see Dwight also told you which of my chains to yank.”
His grin broadened. “He did say you were real easy to rile.”
“Joking aside,” I said earnestly. “I did not sleep with Chan Nolan, I did not carry his baby, and I most certainly did not know that he was allergic to penicillin. Have you talked with Savannah yet?”
He shook his head. “She’s a hard one to catch, what with Market in full swing. We staked out the soup kitchen and the design studio where she used to work—she’s still got office space over there, you know that?—but so far we’ve come up empty. She’s not sleeping in any of the shelters that we can tell.”
“Did you talk to Drew Patterson?”
“She swears she doesn’t know. Says the woman won’t take any money from her, just wants to be with her.”
“Then couldn’t she—?”
“Get her to light long enough to call us?”
I nodded.
“She’s going to try, but who knows? Since you seem to keep running into her, let me give you my pager number just in case.”
He scribbled down the number on the end of the sheet, tore it off and handed it to me. There were nine digits on the paper, not seven.
“What’s this three-five at the end?”
“So I’ll know it’s you calling. That
“Close enough,” I said dryly.
He picked up his pencil again, turned to a fresh sheet in his notepad and said, ‘Tell me again what you saw and heard Thursday evening, from the first minute Savannah sat down at your table in the food court.”
So I told it once more, right up to when the doctor came and told us Chan was dead.
“And you never once caught a glimpse of Savannah during the time you were wandering the halls at GHFM or driving over to the soup kitchen with this reporter, this—” He riffled through the messy pages looking for her name.
“Heather McKenzie. No.”
“And no sign of Chan Nolan?”
“No.”
“The Pattersons? The Trocchi woman? The Colliers? Dixie Babcock? Or what about those dealers that cornered Nolan at the Leathergoods party?”
“No, no, and no,” I said wearily. “I’ve told you. I didn’t see a single familiar face from the time I left the party till I met Ms. McKenzie in the stairwell. And she was it till we got back to Ms. Babcock’s floor. I can’t swear that I didn’t pass Ms. Trocchi or Ms. Collier because I don’t know them. Dixie said she was talking to the Trocchi woman when she spotted me, but I didn’t notice her.”
David Underwood made a notation on his notepad and I almost had to smile. He had turned to that sheet only moments earlier, yet it was already dog-eared and smudged and had begun to tear along the perforations at the top. Two scraps of paper had fallen on the floor and a pencil with a broken lead lay at the edge of the table ready to join them. Amazing. The man himself was immaculately groomed and neatly dressed in a fresh beige pin-striped shirt, crisp green and blue tie, and sharply creased brown slacks, but I had seen his car, his desk and now even this bare room: everything he touched became chaotic and messy.
I couldn’t help wondering what his clearance rate was on his caseload
He tapped the pencil against the pad, making random scratch marks. “Now when you got back to Dixie’s—Ms. Babcock’s?”
“Pell Austin was there. He fixed us a snack. We ate, we talked. Dixie called Chan’s sister and left a message on her machine, then we talked some more and finally called it a night and went to bed around three in the morning.”
“In Mr. Austin’s guest room.”
“Right.”
“And Mr. Austin and Ms. Babcock also called it a night?”
“Well, no. After I turned out my light, I heard him go out the back door and saw him cross the alley to Dixie’s. Her light was still on.”
“You didn’t go with him?”
“Of course not. I assumed they wanted to discuss Chan’s death without a relative stranger sitting there and besides, I was exhausted. I don’t think I turned over once before I fell sound asleep.”
“So you don’t know when Mr. Austin returned?”
I shook my head. “Sorry. I did hear him come in, and there’s a clock radio beside the bed, but I was too tired to notice. Is it important?”
“Possibly. Mrs. Ragsdale called me this morning. One of Nolan’s neighbors over there in Lexington saw lights on in the house early Friday morning. She didn’t think anything about it till she heard he’d died and then she started wondering. Mrs. Ragsdale says there’s no sign of break-in so whoever was there probably had a key to the house.”
“And you think that’s Dixie or Pell?”
