Killer Market

depressive psychosis. I didn’t know what the hell it was—just that there were weeks, months even, when she seemed to be flying. You would swear that she was dropping acid—she used to say that she could hear color and feel design, as if electricity flowed from her fingertips—but it wasn’t drugs. It was the way her brain was wired.”

“And when she crashed?”

“That’s when she’d disappear. I used to think she got burned out and went off on cruises or to a spa or something to recharge. I remember the first time I saw it happen, it was like watching a lightbulb on a dimmer switch, until one day I realized that she was sitting at her drawing table staring at nothing, with tears running down her face over the meaninglessness of the universe. Two days later, she disappeared.”

The memory seemed to sadden him.

“That was pretty much the pattern. She’d finish a major project; then would come a letdown, and she’d go off for a month or two. We never knew where. Eighteen months ago, though, she crashed big-time. She was so far gone, I had to violate her privacy and go through her personal papers to find the name of someone to call. Turned out to be her father down in Georgia. You want to know what his surname is? Smith.”

“You never told me that,” said Dixie. “Smith?”

“Can you believe it? Creedence Smith. He told me he was in his thirties when Savannah was born, so he’s mid- eighties. If he’s still alive. I called down there at Christmas to ask how Savannah was and was told that the phone company no longer had a listing for any Creedence Smith.”

He sighed and offered me more doughnuts. I shook my head. It’s too easy to keep reaching into the box until suddenly you realize you’ve eaten three without even noticing.

“The fact that she’s come back to High Point without telling me or anybody at Mulholland—the way you say she’s dressing and acting so weird? It makes me wonder if he died or had a stroke or something. Without any next of kin to be responsible and keep her there, maybe she checked herself out of the hospital before she was stable.”

“You say she’s never been violent?” I asked skeptically. “What about smashing her car or flushing jewelry? That sounds pretty violent to me.”

“Oh, she could get in a rage at inanimate objects,” he agreed, “but she never directed it toward people.”

“Evelyn was a little scared of her,” Dixie reminded him.

His face softened. “Only because she was in such awe of Savannah’s talents and so diffident about her own.”

Sudden tears glistened in Dixie’s eyes. “Oh, God, Pell!”

He reached across the table and patted her hand. “I know, love. I know.”

“How did she die?” I asked quietly, knowing that sometimes it helped to talk.

“She fell off the Park Avenue stairs,” she said. “Pell was there.”

“It’s what we call one of our staircases at Mulholland,” Pell explained. “It’s about fifteen feet high, very sleek and moderne, sort of a long graceful modified S-curve that’s flat on one side so that we can push it up flush against a wall, make it look as if we’re shooting in an elegant duplex apartment. Evelyn was dressing a set we were going to shoot that afternoon. A rush job. The product was a Fitch and Patterson piece, an armoire, if I remember correctly. A last-minute addition to the line.”

“A last-minute Widdicomb knock-off,” Dixie said bitterly.

“Anyhow, workmen had rolled the staircase into place but for some reason they forgot to lock the brakes, although one guy afterwards swore that he had. I was in prop storage looking for something clever to jazz up the set. Evelyn went up to hang some pictures on a wall near the top and when she started to hammer in the tacks, the stairs slid away from the wall. There was no handrailing on that side and she went right over. They hadn’t laid the rugs yet, so there was nothing to break her fall.”

“Fifteen feet onto a bare concrete floor,” said Dixie. “She died three hours later.”

Pell’s eyes were wet now, too. “A blessing really. There would have been massive brain damage if she’d lived.”

“Another two weeks and the doctors might have saved the baby,” Dixie said brokenly. “A little boy. He was just too premature to live. We buried him in her arms.”

“Oh, Dixie,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t you see, Deborah? I can’t let Millie take Lynnette. She’s all I have now.”

I nodded. “I do see. The thing is, does Underwood know you well enough to understand all this?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“Look at it from his viewpoint. You’re so frantic to keep Lynnette here, you’d do anything to stop Chan from taking her off to Malaysia.”

“Not kill!” Pell said sharply.

“So say you.” I turned back to Dixie. “A prosecutor could argue that after Heather and I left, Savannah came to your office and brought my bag, just as I first asked her to. You open it, find my tablets and a baggie full of brownies that she’s dropped inside, and realize you’ve been handed a gift. You page Chan on his beeper, meet him at the deserted Swingtyme display, offer him a brownie and voila! When he starts having trouble breathing, you tell him to lie down and you’ll go get help. Instead you rush out to your friend’s office and while he’s dying, you’re establishing an alibi.”

There was a moment of stunned silence when I finished talking. Dixie was shaking her head in denial, but Pell said,

“She’s right, Dix. They could build a case if they wanted to.”

He turned to me. “So it’s up to us to find out who really did it.”