Killer Market

Except that it would be taking candy from a baby. His face was much too expressive to run a bluff.

Two things were now quite obvious: 1) he did remember Ms. Heather McKenzie; 2) she was not a reporter.

Not by Mr. Craft’s definition anyhow.

21

« ^ » “The rage for old furniture not only occasions a demand, at most extravagant prices, for genuine articles of undoubted antiquity, but has led to a revival of some old styles, and to very successful imitations.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

The dinner party broke up a little after ten.

Outside the restaurant, we thanked Judge Simmard for a delightful and delicious dinner and waited while he hydraulically hoisted himself and his chair into his van.

The April evening had turned too chilly to linger on the sidewalk after he’d driven away. Lester Craft said goodnight and headed for his own car in the Radisson parking garage and, to my surprise, boisterous Bob and quiet Nancy went off together.

The Pattersons were going on to a private party at the Emerywood Country Club and insisted that the hosts “would be delighted if you and Mr. Han came with us.”

But Albert Han had a car and driver idling at the curb and he wanted to go dancing at a lounge over in Greensboro.

The Pattersons accepted my regrets with polite regrets of their own and departed. Han was a little harder to dissuade. For all his western dress and speech, he seemed to have rather eastern ideas about women and I finally had to speak quite sharply before I finally convinced him that I was not a party favor thoughtfully provided by Judge Simmard.

I didn’t want to party or dance. I wanted to go sit quietly and consider all the things I’d seen and heard these last two days.

Driving back to Dixie’s house, I gave serious thought to Drew Patterson. Certainly she could have given Chan those penicillin-dusted brownies even though she claimed she hadn’t known how serious his allergies were. She said Chan was merely an old friend who had treated her like a kid sister, but had been fun to play with. Dixie said she’d wanted to marry him, but Dixie seemed to see would-be stepmothers to Lynnette at every turn.

Yet, say it was true. Nevertheless, even if Drew had been head over heels for Chan, was his leaving High Point without her motive enough for murder? In this day and age, are there really women who tell themselves, “If I can’t have him, no one will?”

Then there was all that love and pride the Pattersons had invested in their only child.

Dixie thought Jay Patterson was angry at Chan because Chan was leaving Fitch and Patterson, going to Malaysia, and perhaps taking with him valuable proprietary information about Fitch and Patterson business deals. But what if he’d also come to believe that Chan had trifled with his daughter’s affections? An aggressive, pugnacious man like Patterson—

“An aggressive, pugnacious man would have punched him in the nose and been done with it,” said the pragmatist in my mental ear.

On the other hand, as Chan’s employer, he might have known how serious Chan’s allergies were.

And Savannah seemed to trust Patterson. He had helped her take food at the ALWA party Thursday night and he might have seen me pick up that baggie from the floor, the one with my fingerprints all over it. I tried to remember if that baggie was still on the table when first Savannah, then Patterson and finally Drew walked away from the table, but it was just an insignificant little plastic bag and I had absolutely no memory one way or the other.

Dixie said Lavelle Trocchi had been there. She was accused of being Chan’s dupe, of letting him steal a preview catalog of her company’s new designs. She could be fired, her reputation within the industry destroyed. I suppose she could have heard the byplay on the brownies and seen me pick up the baggie.

No one mentioned seeing the Colliers, though. And while those two retailers—Kay Adams and Poppy Jackson —might cheerfully poison Chan, would they have known penicillin would do the trick and would Chan have taken brownies from them?

More to the point, would Savannah have given any of those people my tote bag?

Heather McKenzie said Savannah had immediately disappeared into the bowels of the building.

If Ms. McKenzie could be believed.

But she had followed right on Savannah’s heels. And for a reporter, she showed a singular disinterest in Chan’s death. Was that her way of averting suspicion? Or was it merely further proof that she wasn’t really a reporter?

“Are you finished?” asked the preacher. “Or are you finally going to admit that Dixie Babcock has the strongest reasons to want Chan Nolan dead? She was there at the table with both the baggie and brownies, she knew that penicillin would kill him, AND she had the opportunity when he came to her floor.”

But I was with her that night at the hospital. Her grief. Her bewilderment. Surely her reactions were real.

“A woman you haven’t seen in ten years? How do you know she’s not capable of faking grief and bewilderment?”

He was right. I didn’t.

All the same—

Dixie was in nightgown and robe when I got back to the house. I found her in the living room amid a stack of those family albums.