“
“You’re already involved,” he reminded me. “Soon as you didn’t tell David Underwood we were out in my van late Thursday night, you became our accomplice.”
“
“
17
« ^ » “
Since Savannah’s movements Thursday night held the key to Chan’s death, finding her seemed to be our first logical step. For all my theorizing with Drew Patterson last night, misplaced maternalism hardly seemed a valid motive for murder, even assuming Savannah wasn’t cooking on all four burners. We needed to know when she left my bag at the Swingtyme showroom and who else was there at the time.
“I know she worked at your design studio,” I told Pell, “but where did she live?”
“Furnished apartments all over the area. I don’t think she ever cared about stuff beyond her cars, a few clothes and maybe jewelry. She kept most of her books and personal papers down at the studio. Said she didn’t trust nosy landladies with no lives of their own not to come snooping.”
He looked up her last address and the three of us drove over to Jerilyn Street and talked to the owner of a furnished garage apartment, a woman in her twenties who couldn’t have had a spare moment to snoop. Not with three children under the age of four and, from the looks of her swollen belly, another due any minute.
“The police were here yesterday asking about her,” said young Mrs. Eakes, balancing a baby on one hip and using the other hip to keep a toddler corralled on the porch. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. She wasn’t well, poor thing, and her daddy sent somebody up here to bring her home. It was right before Stephanie Leigh was born—’bout a year and a half ago? Anyhow, I’ve not seen or heard a word from her since I shipped her things down to Athens, Georgia, like her daddy asked me to.”
The efficiency apartment was now rented to a college student who was waxing his car in the driveway. “Now that you mention it, there
“Was there anything?” I asked, resisting the urge to buff a spot he’d missed.
“Just a little cushion.” He measured a twelve-inch square with his hands. “Black velvet with gold tassels in each corner. Wasn’t anything I used and Frances—Mrs. Eakes—wasn’t here to ask, so I let her take it.”
Underwood had told me that Savannah still had work space at Mulholland and that he was going to put the building under surveillance. I was on the middle seat behind Pell and Dixie as he finished circling the block and again turned his blue van off Main Street onto Mulholland. I didn’t see a soul that looked like a police officer.
Traffic was thick and parking spaces around the design studio were at a premium. While Pell maneuvered into the employees’ lot, Dixie and I craned our necks trying to spot a car with someone sitting motionless. On television, the surveillance people are always digging up the streets, stringing telephone wires or staked out in a van with dark windows.
Not here.
No workmen, no smoked windows, and all the cars looked empty.
“Maybe they’re watching from inside one of the surrounding buildings.”
“Look around you, Deborah,” Dixie said dryly. “Do you see any windows overlooking this entrance?”
She had a point. I could see a corner of GHFM, but no windows broke its exterior walls. The same was true of smaller showroom buildings that backed onto this block. Glitter and shine might fill those endless interiors, yet none of it came from natural sunlight.
Pell parked in his assigned slot in front of an inconspicuous rear door and I realized that I must have passed the Mulholland Design Studio a half-dozen times this weekend without noticing it.
Not that they were trying to keep their location secret. The name was carved on a low stone slab next to Mulholland Street, and the stone slab sat amid a narrow strip of evergreens with a thick border of bright yellow pansies running around the whole thing. But the block-square building itself could have been a tobacco warehouse for all the care that had been taken with its design: four windowless cement walls painted mud brown and a pitched roof sheeted in what looked like ordinary barn tin.
Hard to believe that ads for some of the glossiest magazines in the world were shot right here in this building.
Or to realize that a home furnishings revolution had started here when a brilliant young designer made eclecticism a household word.
“Thirty years ago, furniture was still being sold in rigidly matched suites,” Pell told me. “Your mother wore matched cardigan sets, right?”
I nodded as he expected me to.
“So did mine. So did Dix’s. Handbags coordinated with her shoes, right?”
Again I nodded dutifully.
“Same with furniture. Chairs matched tables that matched sideboards which matched china closets. Beds, dressers, and bedside tables—all part of a perfect matched set. If there was a candlestick lamp on one end table, it was balanced by an identical candlestick lamp on the opposite end table. If your couch was upholstered in striped
