“Lynnette took it as well as could be expected, I suppose,” said Pell as he drove me over to the courthouse an hour later after I was freshly dressed, combed and lip-sticked. “Cried a little and then said she didn’t mean that she really didn’t want to go to Kuala Lumpur.”
“Oh Lord.”
“Yeah. We both told her that wasn’t why her Daddy died, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to get her some counseling to make her believe it. Dix, too, for that matter.”
“Oh?”
“It was tearing her to pieces that Chan was moving Lynnette halfway around the globe.” That long lank of straight gray hair fell boyishly across his eye and he pushed it aside with a heavy sigh. “She’s going to have a hard time making herself believe she’s not glad he’s dead.”
“Dixie’s lucky to have you next door,” I said as we headed downtown.
Rush hour was past, but the Market vans and buses that shuttled between downtown and satellite parking areas were out in full force.
“Have you two known each other long?”
“Since first grade at Sedgeneld School over in Greensboro. She was in the third grade and the bus stop was in front of her house. About the fourth day, some big kid—big to me anyhow—tried to take my lunch bag and she sailed in and bloodied his nose.”
I smiled, remembering a few noses I’d bloodied in school myself.
“Both our fathers had taken off before we could walk, but Mrs. Babcock and—”
“Dixie’s mother?”
He raised his eyebrow at the surprise in my voice.
Disconcerted, I said, “I guess it didn’t occur to me back then that Dixie had kept her maiden name.”
His half-smile made me realize what else I hadn’t picked up on and I could feel myself turning red.
“Evelyn would be what now?” I asked defensively. ‘Twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five. Almost twenty-six.”
“Whatever. The point is, twenty-six years ago, nice middle-class Southern girls like Dixie didn’t openly raise a child born out of wedlock.”
“Who said we came from a nice middle-class neighborhood?” he asked sardonically as he slowed for a long white stretch limo that was hogging both lanes.
I didn’t have an answer to that one.
“Actually, it was worse than middle-class,” he said, taking pity on my embarrassment. “It was poor-white respectable, and Dix didn’t hang around to be preached at. She took off to someplace down East before anybody here knew she was pregnant.”
“What about the father?”
“He never knew. He was just someone she met down at the beach the Easter before she graduated. A gang of senior girls went down for spring break, met some guys from the Citadel. You know how it goes.”
I did. Too much Carolina moon, too much warm spring nights, too much beer and pot. Been there, done that, but only bought the T-shirt, luckily—not a baby.
“Close as we were, Dixie didn’t even tell me. Just dropped out of sight. First I knew about Evelyn was when I found her again, when she was going for that law degree.”
“At Chapel Hill?”
“Yeah. I was over there helping Savannah design and decorate a funky place on Franklin Street—the owner had more money than taste—and there was Dix, working the afternoon shift at a coffee bar next door. I hadn’t seen her since high school and even then, I don’t think she’d have told me about Evelyn except that she was pouring me an espresso when the phone call came that some drunk had plowed through a school crossing. I rushed Dix over to the hospital and I was still there when the doctors came out of surgery and said Evelyn was going to be fine. And she was, but it took a lot of nursing and physical therapy and Dix had to quit law school.”
“Surely there was insurance money?”
“From the drunk? Yeah. They got a nice settlement. Eventually. After the guy’s parents dragged it through court for two years trying to keep it off his record.”
He edged the van around the limo and took a left over to North Centennial. Several blocks ahead, the new courthouse rose white and gleaming at the top of a hill, in contrast to the huge navy-blue cluster of windowless GHFM buildings off to the right.
“She had it rough, didn’t she? I never knew how rough.” Even though Dixie and I hadn’t been particularly close, learning what she’d gone through back then made me feel callous and self-centered in retrospect.
“You were younger then,” Pell said, reading my mind. “You probably had your own problems.”
Well, yes, there was that.
He pulled up to a side door of the courthouse.
“But everything worked out great after they came to High Point.” His voice turned suddenly venomous. “Until Evelyn married that prick.”
I wanted to ask what he meant, but a uniformed guard was motioning for us to move it.
Pell handed me a house key. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but make yourself at home.”
I thanked him and hurried inside. Only ten minutes to do the professional courtesies and find the courtroom for Randy J. Verlin vs. April Ann Jenner for the custody of Travis Tritt Verlin, minor.
Which was where Detective David Underwood found me.
9
« ^ » “Chair manufacturing is carried on by contract in several of the prisons and penal establishments in the country, and it is a very important American industry.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
“Chan Nolan’s death was a homicide?” I was bewildered as I followed Detective Underwood out to his car. “But the doctor said it was an allergic reaction. Anaphylactic shock.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He held the door open for me on a car ankle-deep in empty foam coffee cups and crumpled hamburger wrappers—“Just kick ’em out of your way,” he murmured—and we drove the short distance to police headquarters on Leonard Street “We have a little problem with how he ingested the agent.”
Here at lunchtime, the streets were clogged again with shuttle vans, cars with license plates from a dozen different states, and a couple of black limos of ordinary length.
“I can’t get over the difference,” I said, telling Detective Underwood how deserted the streets seemed the day my friend and I drove through.
“Most of the year, we’re just another Piedmont mill town. But during Market, we—oh damn and blast and expletive deleted!” he muttered as a shuttle van stopped in our lane to let someone out.
Detective David Underwood was an impatient driver and he squeezed his car through nonexistent openings and narrow alleyways.
The brick and concrete block building on Leonard Street was a remodeled school, he told me, and once we were inside, he took me into a small room that could have been the school nurse’s office. A uniformed officer quickly and efficiently rolled my fingertips, one at a time, from ink pad to a card that could be scanned by the computer.
I cleaned my hands with a packaged towelette, then followed Underwood as he stopped by the squad room to pick up a legal pad and a bulky manila envelope from a desk that was even messier than his car.
A few steps farther down the hall was a tiny interview room no bigger than six foot square and bare of all furnishings save two straight-backed chairs that faced each other across a small metal table.
Underwood rummaged in his manila envelope and pulled out a clear plastic bag with a brown plastic prescription bottle inside.
“This yours?”
The label was still intact. If I could clearly read my name and my doctor’s, surely he could as well.
“Do we really have to play games, Detective Underwood?” I asked. “Of course it’s mine. Penicillin. And it’s hours past my time for another dose.”
I reached for the bag, but Underwood continued to hold it.
“How many tablets are supposed to be here?”
“Six? Or is it four?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, ma’am.”