Killer Market

“My dad’s aunt was devoted to genealogy,” she said as she reshelved the bulging scrapbooks. “Spent the last twenty years of her life trying to account for every leaf and twig on the family tree. When she died, she left all her research to me. For some reason, Lynnette’s fascinated by the family stories. She’d rather hear about a great- grandfather milking cows or how his mother shot a copperhead than any regular bedtime storybook.”

“So she wasn’t stolen by the Ragsdales and forced across state lines to Maryland?”

Dixie gave a sheepish smile. “Okay, so maybe I overreacted.”

Her chestnut hair gleamed in the lamplight. “How was Noble’s? What did you have to eat?”

“Grilled chicken with lemon and watercress. It was wonderful. Interesting conversation, too,” I said and described the table. “It was too crowded to say much to the robotics man, but it’s such a bizarre concept when you think about it.”

“Think about what?”

“Well, take stressing, for instance. They used to have a guy at the factory who would bang up new furniture to make it look old, right?”

She nodded. “Only it’s called distressing.”

“So he’d spend day after day distressing this new wood: gouging it, banging it with pipes and hammers, nicking the edges, the whole nine yards. Now he’s been replaced by a robot that’ll do the exact same thing. You could say that a man’s been put out of work by an artificial intelligence, except that the work he was doing was artificial to begin with. His fake marks were random though, and customers, according to Bob, want the exact same thing they see in the store. If there’s a wormhole three inches in on the floor model, they want theirs to have the wormhole three inches in. I mean, robots are faking something fake to begin with and then standardizing it?”

Dixie grinned. “What’s your point here, Knott?”

“The point is, you could probably buy original antiques for about the same as you’d pay for high-end reproductions.”

“Real antiques? Someone else’s castoffs? My dear, you don’t know where they’ve been. Reproductions are new. Sanitary!”

Albert Han and his after-dinner persistence made her laugh. “I don’t know if special pains are being taken for the Chinese, but when the Japanese first started coming to Market, some of the exhibitors wondered if they ought to supply geishas. Actually, I think a couple of them did. An American version anyhow.”

“I wonder if some of those hostesses working the hospitality rooms will show up in my courtroom this week.”

“Not this week. The police usually do a sweep the week before Market and they’ll do another the week after Market, but during Market? Huh-uh.”

I stepped out of my high heels and perched on the arm of the couch. “Changing the subject, what’s your take on Heather McKenzie?”

“That reporter? Seems like a nice kid, why? Was she there tonight?”

“No, but the editor of Furniture/Today was and guess what? He kept saying he didn’t have a reporter by that name.”

“So?” She shoved the last of the albums back into its slot “I bet the guy from Home-Lite in New Jersey doesn’t know he’s got a sales rep named Jacki Sotelli. People shuffle badges like cards.”

“Maybe. But when I mentioned that she was down from Massachusetts, he suddenly remembered who she really is. He tried to cover, but it was clear she’s not on his payroll.“ Dixie sat on the couch with her knees drawn up to her chin and her feline eyes were thoughtful. ”So who’s payroll is she on and why are they so interested in Savannah?”

We mulled it over a while, then Dixie said goodnight—“Lynnette will be up at first light”—and I toddled off to the guest room where I lay awake another hour trying to make some sense of things.

It kept circling back to Savannah, her delusions about Drew, her instability that began—

Sudden illumination pierced the darkness. Not for nothing had I sat in all those sessions of traffic court since coming to the bench.

Pell and Dixie and Jay Patterson, too—all agreed that the first major manifestation of Savannah’s bipolar disorder was when she destroyed her Porsche with a sledgehammer and then disappeared for nearly two years.

What if that sudden, violent destruction had been to hide evidence of a hit-and-run? When seventeen-year-old Drew was at the wheel?

The trouble, of course, was that I didn’t have enough facts. I really needed to ask David Underwood some questions, even though I didn’t have much hope that he’d answer.

22

« ^ » “The Egyptians had metal mirrors, and a great profusion of kitchen utensils, and dishes of all sorts for the table.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

Next morning, I discovered that Detective Underwood had a few questions of his own.

He called first thing and invited me to come out for coffee, pancakes and some informal discussion at the local IHOP.

“Don’t you ever take a day off?” I asked, sliding into the other side of his booth.