Fairness made her admit that at least Chan kept up appearances and hadn’t flaunted his unfaithfulness to Evelyn. “I honestly think he loved her as much as he could love any one woman and he did make her happy most of the time.”
As her thoughts turned from the past to the future, she sighed and worried aloud about telling Lynnette. “She’ll probably be asleep when we get home, but even if she isn’t, I think I’ll wait till tomorrow so she doesn’t lie awake all night grieving.” She sighed again. “I guess I’d better go ahead and call Chan’s sister tonight, though. It’s going to be rough. They have one of those big-brother/little-sister relationships and she still idolizes him.”
I tried to remember a little sister, but truth to tell, I’d been in such a self-destructive haze that year after my mother died that I could barely conjure up any real sense of Chan’s teenage personality beyond his groping hands and pimply face. What he talked about, whether he sneezed much, who his people were—what little I did remember was rapidly being overlaid and replaced by the vividness of the man he had become.
A few blocks east of Main Street, Dixie turned into an alleyway that formed a cul-de-sac between two old bungalows. From what I could see by the streetlights, they had been restored to prewar beauty and looked both trendy and solid at the same time.
A slender, loose-limbed man appeared in the doorway of one and came on out to the car.
Until that moment, Dixie had seemed fairly controlled, but when he opened her car door and asked, “How’s Chan?” she leaned against his thin chest and fell apart.
He held her quietly until her sobs subsided, then put out his hand to me and said, “Deborah Knott? I’m Pell Austin. Sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.”
It was almost three o’clock before Dixie was ready to call it a night. Lynnette was sound asleep, Pell told her, but as soon as we stepped inside, Dixie still had to tiptoe down the hall to her bedroom and check for herself.
As we passed the darkened living room, a woman who was lying there on the sofa bed roused up, the “decorina friend from California,” no doubt. A blanket slid off her bare shoulders as she propped herself on one elbow and I had an impression of long yellow hair that fell over full breasts.
“Dixie? Where the heck were you, girl?” Her voice was slurred with either sleep or alcohol. “I snagged you one of the cutest guys at the whole damn party. And I’d’ve brought him and his friend home with me ’cept I’m still lagged out from that red-eye special. Sorry.”
“Go back to sleep, Cheryl,” said Dixie. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
Out in the kitchen, she shook her head wearily. “I can’t deal with Chan’s death and Cheryl’s annual party-girl syndrome at the same time. I feel old, Pell.”
“Not you, love,” he assured her gallantly.
Here beneath the bright kitchen lights, I saw that Pell Austin was probably no older than Dixie, who no doubt owed the lack of gray in her gleaming chestnut tresses to the skills of an expensive beautician.
Pell’s thick straight hair was more salt than pepper. It was cut short in back but had been left long enough in front to brush across his eyes.
His face was long and narrow but his plainness was more than offset by level blue eyes and a humorous quirk to his small mouth. There was something oddly familiar about him that I couldn’t immediately place, but I am always drawn to faces that seem to look on human folly with compassion and amusement and I could understand why Dixie might be fond of him.
At first I wondered if they were old lovers, but as he puttered around her kitchen, brewing fresh coffee and toasting English muffins, I realized that theirs was a deep and longstanding friendship, much like mine with Dwight Bryant back in Dobbs: more brother and sister than man and woman.
Eventually, of course, the penny dropped all the way. Not that he was effeminate of manner or prissy of speech or any of the other stereotypes. Quite the contrary. But with most men—whether they’re twenty or sixty, and even if I’m not on the prowl and neither are they—there’s usually an initial sexual awareness when we first meet, the old primeval “you man/me woman” thing. There was no answering awareness from Pell, only a certain sweet gentleness.
“Pell’s head designer at Mulholland Studio, two blocks over from the GHFM building,” Dixie told me. “He handles the national print campaigns for Start SMart, Coley Bridge, and Kindlehoff.”
“Coley Bridge makes mattresses, right?”
He nodded.
“And I gave one of my nieces a Start SMart lamp at her baby shower because she wanted everything in the nursery to be from their—Fairyland, was it?”
“The Elfhome Collection,” Pell murmured.
“But what’s Kindlehoff?”
Dixie grinned and her tone was teasing. “Remember when Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker got into trouble with their gold-plated bathroom faucets?”
“Don’t you listen to her. That was not Kindlehoff,” Pell told me. “But they are the Cadillac of high-quality plumbing fixtures for bath and kitchen.”
“God don’t say his preachers got to use junk,” Dixie deadpanned.
Like Dixie, Pell Austin seemed to know everyone in the industry and, as is often the case after the sudden death of someone not exactly beloved, the conversation in Dixie’s kitchen that night swerved from stunned bewilderment to a certain cynical assessment of Chan’s life as it affected them, Lynnette, and people like Poppy Jackson, Kay Adams, and Fitch and Patterson. Not to mention Drew Patterson.
“Jay won’t be sorry Chan’s dead,” said Dixie.
“Because of Drew?” I asked.
“Because of Jacaranda. He accused Chan of planning to take proprietary sales data with him.”
Pell’s lips crooked ironically. “Jay Patterson’s no one to grumble if his pet bulldog bites him in the ankle. You hear about Hickory-Dock? It was all over the Market tonight.”
“No, what?”
“What’s Hickory-Dock?” I asked.
“Children’s furniture. Like Start SMart, only higher end,” Pell told me. To Dixie, he said, “They’re claiming that Fitch and Patterson—more specifically, that Chan, as Fitch and Patterson’s VP of Sales—got hold of their preview catalog. They’re saying Fitch and Patterson’s new children’s line is a direct knockoff. They don’t know who’s to blame precisely, but rumor has it that Lavelle Trocchi’s head is on the chopping block.”
For my benefit, they explained that Lavelle Trocchi was one of Hickory-Dock’s top sales representatives.
“She was the one I was talking to when I saw you at the ALWA party, Deborah,” Dixie said. “She seemed a little down, but I thought that was because Chan—dear God! I can’t believe he’s really gone. What am I going to tell Lynnette? How could an allergy kill him so quickly?”
Pell squeezed her shoulder.
To divert her from dwelling on it, I said, “I don’t remember who you were talking to at the party. Was she involved with Chan?”
“Somebody saw her coming out of his hotel room early one morning up at the Fitchburg Market last month,” said Pell.
I was puzzled. “So what difference does it make if he saw their catalog a little early? Doesn’t it take three or four months to put a new piece of furniture into production?”
Dixie said grimly, “Honey, Fitch and Patterson has an engineering department that can look at a photograph or line drawing, then spec out the proportions and have a good knockoff on the floor in twenty-four hours.”