“It was still irrelevant. And a complication I don’t need.” I smoothed the sheets and reached for a fresh pillowcase. “Now I’ve got to go down to Underwood’s office tomorrow and spend a couple of hours convincing him that I didn’t bear Chan’s love child and then murder him twenty years after the non-fact.”
“Serves you right,” she said tartly, and I knew that at least one person believed me.
She cut those slanted, catlike eyes at me. “Heavy breathing, huh?”
I threw the pillow at her.
We were both tired, but too wound up for sleep, so Dixie found an open bottle of white wine in her refrigerator and we carried our glasses into the living room, a room that was warm and inviting and personalized with family photographs, keepsakes and a shelf full of bulging scrapbooks. We curled up at either end of the long couch and played “Whatever Happened to What’s Her Name?” for a while until talk drifted into more personal channels.
I told her about Kidd. She told me about an intense affair that had ended in rancor shortly before Evelyn’s death and how she thought she’d maybe just quit trying. “But I met someone down at the Tupelo Market in February. Tom’s not handsome, but he’s awfully nice. He acts as if I’m special—”
“As well he should,” I murmured.
“—and he makes me laugh.”
We agreed that laughter was important.
“What about Pell?” I asked when we’d thoroughly dissected Dixie’s love life. “I don’t see any signs that he’s sharing his house with anyone.”
She sighed and shook her head. “You don’t know what a hellish two years it’s been. First we lost Evelyn and then we lost James.”
“He and Pell?”
She nodded. “He was an investment broker. Knew the stock market like I know High Point Thanks to him, Pell and I both have solid investment programs.”
She half knelt on the couch to pluck a small framed photograph from the collection on the table behind us. It showed Pell and another man head-to-head in an affectionately clowning pose.
“To look at James, you’d think he was gray tweed, button-down collars and all business. You’ve seen Pell’s living room?”
I smiled.
“Yeah. Well, James was the one who found the boa constrictor and he was the one who put sunglasses on the Nubian slave boys. They were together for eight years.”
“Why did they break up?”
“They didn’t. He died last summer.”
“Oh, Dixie!” Apprehension touched my heart as I asked the inevitable question. “AIDS?”
She shook her head. “Pancreatic cancer. Thirty-nine days after he was diagnosed, he was dead.”
We had another glass of wine and eventually our talk wound back to Savannah, and I described for Dixie my impression of the picture in Heather McKenzie’s car. “She really looked like a dynamo. I would imagine her love life was pretty active.”
Dixie sipped her wine reflectively. “At one time or another, I’ve heard her linked with everybody from Mack Keehbler and Jay Patterson to Jacob Collier and—”
“Jacob Collier?”
“Oh yes. Jacob may be pushing eighty but the man’s a billy goat with monkey glands.”
I had to laugh at the image that conjured up, and remembering the snippet of gossip I’d overheard at the Discovery Center, I said, “I guess Chan thought his sex life undercut his effectiveness as a salesman.”
“Come again?”
“I heard someone say Chan was annoyed about Collier’s heavy dating.”
Dixie leaned back against the burgundy velvet cushions and laughed so hard that her eyes disappeared into slanted crinkles.
“What?” I said, kicking her with my stockinged feet. “What’s so funny?”
“You. You don’t have a clue as to what heavy dating is, do you?”
“If it’s that funny, I guess I don’t.”
“Actually,” she said, sobering up, “it’s not all that funny. Not for Jacob Collier. Heavy dating got him in trouble all right, but it has nothing to do with his sexual proclivities. See, dating is the number of days a sales rep will give a retailer to pay off the sale, usually in increments of thirty: thirty, sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty, or two-forty. Chan was going over some of Jacob’s accounts and saw that he’d given Kay Adams and Poppy Jackson datings of two hundred and forty days on a half-million of goods. That’s incredible these days. It’s like turning Fitch and Patterson into a personal loan banker, which is another reason why Chan was going to pull their business. They keep too much inventory on hand and they rely too much on heavy dating instead of turning the merchandise over. More aggressive businesses depend on smaller inventories, better management, jazzier sales techniques, et cetera for quick turn-arounds. And they pay up in a thirty-sixty-ninety-day time frame.”
That I could understand. “And what’s the Golden Egg?”
Dixie smiled. “It’s what sales people call this territory. North Carolina not only has some of the biggest retailers in the country, we also have the transshippers here. Very lucrative pickings.”
“Drew says that Tracy Collier and her dad would normally inherit her grandfather’s sales territory.”
“Was Chan going to cut into her Golden Egg?” Dixie asked maliciously. “You’d better believe it!”
“I gather you don’t like her. Because she’s ambitious?”
“I don’t mind legitimate ambition. Jacob’s made a lot of money over the years here, but he genuinely cares about my small retailers. I don’t know his son, but I do know that Tracy only cares about the money. And the power. She’s bright, she’s pretty, and she went after Chan with everything in her arsenal, including messing with Evelyn’s head. She asked Evelyn to give him a divorce. And that’s where she cut her throat with Chan. As I told you before, he might flirt around, but he loved Evelyn, wanted the marriage to work and he was so happy about the baby. After what Tracy did, her days were numbered. Chan’d already taken some of Jacob’s best accounts for the house and he planned to convert most of the rest before he went to Jacaranda. Tracy would have been lucky to have enough egg left for Sunday brunch.”
“Sounds like a motive for murder to me,” I observed.
Dixie’s feline eyes narrowed. “It does, doesn’t it? Too bad she wasn’t there when Savannah walked out with your bag.”
“But did she know Chan was that allergic to penicillin? Drew said she didn’t and she must have known him for years.”
“Allergies didn’t go with his macho image,” Dixie said. “He thought allergies were for wimps and always downplayed his. I remember last summer when we were all up at the Pattersons’ camp on Hidden Lake for the company’s annual outing. Chan was in the middle of a course of antibiotics for a root canal and he forgot to bring his pills that day. Elizabeth Patterson offered him some penicillin tablets she had left over from some minor infection or other and he said maybe it wouldn’t hurt to skip a couple of doses. She insisted until he finally admitted he had a problem with penicillin but he really didn’t like having to tell her.”
Dixie may have understood why I hadn’t mentioned knowing Chan, but by noon the next day, I began to feel that she was a distinct minority.
Before I’d even had my first cup of coffee, she called me to the telephone and there was Dwight Bryant fuming in my ear.
“What the hell’s going on up there, Deb’rah?” he asked. “I’ve just got off the phone with David Underwood for the second time in two days about you. How come you’re lying to him about that guy that got himself killed? With your penicillin tablets, too?”
“I didn’t lie,” I said stiffly.
“He sure thinks you did.”
“Okay, maybe I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I certainly didn’t lie.”
“Yeah, I know you and your maybe-I-didn’t- tell-the-whole-truth. Listen, Deb’rah. This is no joke. Yesterday morning, Underwood thought you had means and opportunity. Today, he thinks you’ve got motive, too. I’ve calmed him down a little, but quit playing games with him, okay?”