Bitch Factor

by Chris Rogers

  “Now, Dixie! We can’t use those things. They’ll upset the color balance. These are designer decorations. The latest fashion.”

  “Gold balls and red bows. That’s new?”

  “Look at the impressions in the gold. Computer chips!”

  Dixie tucked the gingerbread men back in their box. “These beaded balls won’t clash. They’re mostly red and gold.” Ignoring Amy’s exaggerated sigh, she hung the two ornaments in prominent positions, then stepped aside to let Carl work another string of lights among the branches.

  “I said traditional!” Amy shouted at the paneled wall—on the other side, “Jingle Bells” was being rendered in something between rap and reggae.

  Carl anchored the light string, then stood back to scowl at the electrical outlet.

  “Must be fifty years old. This whole house likely needs rewiring. Cost you a bundle, changing all that wire.”

  … bounce… bounce… bounce…

  As Dixie resumed her exploration of the boxes from the attic, Ryan charged into the middle of them. He found a snow family Kathleen had bought one Christmas—snowman, snowwoman, two snowbabies, the Flannigans’ names embroidered on their hats.

  “Cool!” Ryan carried them to the tree. “I remember these. Gramma used them every year.”

  Amy heaved another martyred sigh. “Put them somewhere inconspicuous, please, Ryan. Carl, what’s wrong with those lights? They’re not winking.”

  “It’s the wiring. Old wiring’s not going to work with these new-style lights.”

  “I think you have to replace one of the bulbs with that special bulb in the plastic bag,” Amy pointed out. “Dixie, maybe you should consider selling this house—or rent it out—and move closer to town. There’s a nice place for sale right down the street from us.” She paused, then, offhanded, like it was nothing special, she added, “The nicest man has joined our choir.”

  Dixie felt bad news coming like a blast of cold air.

  “You mean Mr. Snelling, Mom?” Ryan rummaged through the attic boxes for more treasures. “Snelling’s old, and he stares at everybody over the top of his glasses.”

  “Old? Delbert Snelling is younger than me!” Amy pinched her son playfully on the ear. “And your Aunt Dixie’s not getting any younger.”

  Dixie had turned thirty-nine in November.

  “Anyway, I invited him to dinner Christmas night—”

  “Amy! I asked you not to fix me up—”

  “Now, Dixie, this isn’t a date. I just thought… well, the poor man doesn’t have any family here, not a soul. I know how you hate to see anybody spend Christmas alone.”

  True. But what a coincidence that this solitary soul happened to be near Dixie’s age and unmarried. Amy would never understand that some women preferred solitude. She believed people should be paired off like socks.

  “My empty stomach tells me it’s time to set the table,” Dixie announced, making a beeline for the dining room. Dating had never been her strong suit. Men she met were always too tall, too short, too macho, too sensitive, too rude, or too quick with a lasso. In college, she’d dated sporadically, and in the years that followed had enjoyed several long-term “situations.” But she always bailed out when they looked like becoming permanent.

  Kathleen’s good china gleamed behind the glass doors of the oak hutch. Dixie lifted down four plates, inspected them for dust, then set them around the oak table. The room rarely was used anymore, but until the final stages of Kathleen’s illness, every Sunday had found it filled with noisy good humor and the mouthwatering aroma of peaches and cinnamon. Kathleen had made the best peach cobbler in Texas, attested to by a State Fair blue ribbon that hung framed on the dining-room wall, under another of Kathleen’s needlepoint maxims—When You Make Your Mark in the World, Watch Out For the Guys With Erasers.

  Dixie moved Carl’s brisket to a carving plate, then peeled plastic covers from a bowl of coleslaw and the pecan pie. Flannigan holiday meals always included dishes made with the rich meat of paper-shell pecans—from pecan rolls at breakfast to tuna-pecan sandwiches at lunch to pecan stuffing and buttered-pecan ice cream at dinner. Each Christmas Eve, the family would gather in the kitchen, Kathleen rubbing oil on a turkey in a blue granite roaster, Barney chopping pecans from the family stash. Heat from the stove turned their faces rosy. Kathleen, her knot of white hair springing loose to halo around her face, always looked happiest in her kitchen, and Barney sang the goofiest Christmas songs. While Amy mixed cookie dough, Dixie, who’d never been much of a cook even under Kathleen’s watchful eye, had kept the dishes washed. Flannigan holidays were a buzz of mundane activities made festive with wacky moments, colorful trappings, and marvelous food.

  Holidays now were the times Dixie missed her adoptive parents most. She knew that’s why Amy had insisted on coming over this evening to trim the tree. Shortly after Kathleen’s death, when Barney started moping around looking like he wanted to join her, Dixie had moved back home. Six months later, despite Dixie’s best efforts, Barney was dead, too. This would be her first Christmas alone in the house.

  She Sliced a fresh loaf of bakery bread, her solitary contribution to the night’s meal, and arranged it in a basket under one of Kathleen’s embroidered dish towels. A boyish hand slipped under the towel and snatched a slice. Ryan had come up quietly behind her.

  “Snelling isn’t really so bad, I guess.” He picked up a carving knife and began drawing designs in the butter.

  Dixie took the knife away and gave him a handful of utensils to arrange beside the plates. “You think I should meet him? Think he’s prime uncle material?”

  Ryan shrugged. “Mom thinks you should get a life.”

  “I have a life. Only it’s not the kind your mother wants me to have.”

  “Mom thinks I need an uncle to round out my extended family.”

  “What do you think?”

  He picked at a stray bit of meat that had clung to the foil cover. “I think if I had to live all alone I’d be lonely.”

  Dixie winced. Sometimes Ryan’s perception at twelve was sharper than her own at thirty-nine. “Sometimes I do get lonely, but not because I’m alone. I get lonely for… people I miss.”

  “Like Gramma and Grampa Flannigan?”

  “Sometimes. And like you, and your mother. That’s when your beeper goes off with a message to call your Aunt Dixie.” She goosed him lightly in the ribs. “What do you think? Think I need a life?”

  He rolled his shoulders again in that lazy shrug, then turned to peel the plastic lid off the plate of cookies on the buffet. After a moment, he said, “I think, if I was you, living here in Gramma and Grampa’s house, with all their things here, but not them, I’d be sad.”

  Dixie studied the framed family pictures on the bottom shelf of the hutch and searched for sadness in those familiar treasures. She didn’t find it.

  “Mom says there’s lots of guys around who wouldn’t mind being an uncle.” He opened the Parker Dann file, where she had tossed it on the buffet, and stood flipping the cover lazily back and forth. “She says, pick up any newspaper and read the personals.”

  “Did you tell her some of those guys are creeps you wouldn’t want for an uncle?”

  The shoulder roll again. “She says the men you meet doing the work you do are creeps.” He hurried on, tugging a crumpled page of newsprint from his pocket. “Look at this. Some of the ads are guys with motorcycles and speedboats.”

  “Hey, whose side are you on, kid?” Dixie could hear Amy’s influence in Ryan’s words. She was used to Amy trying to pat and tuck Dixie’s life into her own idea of perfection, but Ryan had always thought his aunt’s work was “cool.” And what he thought mattered. Dixie couldn’t help wanting to be a hero in her nephew’s eyes.

  “I’m on your side,” he said. “I asked Mom if I could stay here and keep you company during school break.” He dipped his head. “She said you wouldn’t be home enough to notice.”

  Unfolding the paper, he showed her an ad h
e’d circled in red marker.

  “‘DWM, forty-five,’” she read. “Divorced white male? ‘Six-foot-five, two hundred pounds’?” At five-four, 120 pounds, Dixie would feel like a dwarf by such a man. “The age is okay, I guess.”

  “Look at the best part. He likes to hang glide and bungee jump. That’s dangerous stuff, like you chasing criminals.”

  “Dangerous?” She grinned at him. “Bungee jumping is insane”

  Then her gaze fell on the file Ryan was fingering, and she remembered she needed to call Belle Richards. Frankly, she didn’t want to risk missing Christmas with her family just to chase down some drunk driver. She should call now, give the attorney enough time to hire another skip tracer.

  “Hey, I know her!” Ryan was looking down at the file. The Richards, Blackmon & Drake label was plastered on the front.

  “Ms. Richards? Sure, you met her in the summer.” In August Ryan had spent a week with Dixie, and she’d taken him by the lawyer’s office.

  “I mean Elizabeth Keyes, the girl who was run over.”

  “Are you sure?” Their schools were miles apart.

  “Yeah. We met last year, during the Kids in the Arts project. Remember, my drawing won a District Honorable Mention. So did Betsy’s story. And after the accident, a safety cop came to talk to us about it.” Ryan turned to the newspaper photo taken in the courtroom. “They’re going to fry this guy that killed Betsy, aren’t they?”

  Watching the taillights on Carl’s Buick fade into the night, Dixie mentally ticked off the places Parker Dann was most likely to be found at nine o’clock two nights before Christmas. According to the depositions in his file, the man’s closest friend was a bartender at the Green Hornet Saloon. A neighbor woman, obviously an admirer, had called Dann “a charming, thoughtful gentleman who always ran the lawn mower over her front yard when he finished cutting his own.” Perhaps the neighbor invited the “charming gentleman” over for some Christmas cheer.

  In addition to the Green Hornet, Dann frequented neighborhood coffeehouses, restaurants, movies—places where people were likely to congregate. He didn’t travel, except for work-related trips, which had ceased with his arrest and subsequent release on bail. Most of Dann’s bumming-around time appeared to be spent within a few city blocks.

  All through dinner, Ryan’s words had kept nagging at her: They’re going to fry this guy… aren’t they? Sure. If he didn’t skip the country while the judge and jury were opening their Christmas gifts. When Amy offered to serve the pecan pie, warmed in the microwave and topped with buttered-pecan ice cream, Dixie had slipped into the bedroom, phoned Belle, and agreed to keep an eye on Dann over the holidays. What could it take, an hour maybe, to check out his favorite haunts? Once she found him, she’d slap a tracking transmitter on his car—an expensive little toy that would let her know if he exceeded a fifty-mile radius from Houston. Then she’d go back to celebrating Christmas.

  When Carl’s taillights finally turned the corner, Dixie shut the front door and began to seal up the Christmas boxes she’d brought down from the attic. A brass horn clattered to the rug. She picked it up. Amy’s designer tree had turned out fine, but a few pieces from the family collection might help the red and gold spectacle fit in better with Dixie’s traditional living room. The brass horn had adorned the Flannigan tree every Christmas Dixie could remember. She clipped it near a red bulb that immediately warmed the brass with a rosy glow.

  About to close the box again, she noticed a string of crystal snowflakes. She had always loved those snowflakes—and the tree needed a spot of white.

  During dinner, she’d also figured out how to handle Amy’s holiday matchmaking: simply play along. Later, while she and Amy were loading the dishwasher, Dixie “confessed” that she looked forward to meeting Delbert Snelling. She could pretend to be smitten when the day actually arrived—“Delbert’s really the nicest man, Sis, just as you said”—which would keep Amy from dragging up any other strays. At the same time, Dixie could come off so obnoxious Snelling would never call her for a date. By the time Amy figured it out, the holidays would be long past.

  Hanging the last ornament, a pudgy Santa’s face fashioned from cotton and yarn, Dixie pronounced the tree finished. She tossed the empty box in a corner, unplugged the lights, and heaved a resigned sigh: might as well start looking for Parker Dann. By now, he should be mildly sotted and easy to find. She grabbed his file from the buffet and her jacket from the closet.

  As she strode through the kitchen, a piece of paper fluttered on the refrigerator door, anchored with a magnet Ryan had made in art class—a ceramic heart framing his school picture. Dixie stopped to look. On the notepaper, a neatly printed block read:

  SWF, 39, BROWN HAIR, BROWN EYES, AND STILL PRETTY FOXY. LIKES AWESOMELY DANGEROUS SPORTS LIKE DOWNHILL DIRT BIKING. SOMETIMES BRINGS HER 12-YEAR-OLD NEPHEW.

  Below that, Ryan had scrawled: Dear Aunt Dixie: I’ll put this on the Internet tonight and scan in a snapshot of you from when we went swimming last summer. You’ll have loads of replies by New Years. So don’t worry about Old Snelling.

  Chapter Four

  Feed a cop and you’ve got a friend for life, an attorney had told Dixie when she joined the DA’s staff. At the time, the remark had rubbed her naive sense of ethics the wrong way.

  In fact, the value of networking—building a grid of people who knew other people who knew other, possibly very important, people—eluded her until the day a patrolman in Denver witnessed a situation that helped Dixie nail a husband-wife burglary team in Houston. Working off-duty at a Rockies game, the patrolman saw the couple talking to a local fence they claimed never to have met. Bingo! Dixie closed the case quick as a hiccup. Now she had law enforcement contacts in forty-two of the fifty states—and the night truly had a thousand eyes.

  She’d need all of them if Parker Dann had fled to Canada.

  Slim Jim McGrue of the Texas Highway Patrol had come through more than once over the years. McGrue could be a big help tonight, too, if Dixie could only talk him into it. Unfortunately, the fact that Dann had not yet officially jumped bail prevented her from being totally honest.

  After checking around Dann’s neighborhood without luck, Dixie had jimmied the lock on his back door. She found the small house neat and clean. A few hangers swung empty in the closet, but that didn’t mean much. A couple of empty suitcases were stacked behind the suits. His shaving gear remained in the bathroom cabinet, but not his toothbrush or toothpaste. The most permanent personal item in the house was a well-stocked bookcase. Dixie thumbed through a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Either Dann bought it used or he had spent many hours reading it. Nothing told her specifically Dann had skipped, yet she knew he had. The house felt like its owner wouldn’t be returning.

  Calling in a few favors, Dixie had set up watch posts at the nearest border towns, Brownsville and Laredo, and at the Louisiana state line. Then she’d phoned McGrue. When he agreed to meet, she’d had to fight off her usual case of the shivers. Watching him now through the diner window as he unfolded from his patrol car, Dixie was reminded of a praying mantis. How many lawbreakers had watched that sight in their rearview mirrors and soiled their car seats?

  Six-foot-eight and thin as a shadow, the Highway Patrolman moved through the diner with a loose-jointed, sticklike grace. People stared. He didn’t seem to notice. Once, in apprehending a criminal, Dixie had seen McGrue stretch his long legs to cover the length of a football field in an eye blink, as if time itself had folded a stitch. Scary. With his deepset eyes, the iridescent green of pond algae, finely chiseled nose, and sensuous mouth, McGrue was admittedly handsome, but as spooky as a walking cadaver.

  He nodded a greeting and slid into the booth. Dixie recalled Amy’s comment that the men Dixie worked around were all creeps—meaning the criminal element, of course. What would she think of McGrue?

  When the waitress arrived, Dixie ordered an unwanted cup of coffee for herself. The patrolman ordered grapefruit juice.

&n
bsp; “Tell me this, Counselor,” he said, after swallowing half the juice in one gulp. “With six major highways leaving Houston, not counting the Gulf Freeway to the coast, why would your friend choose to go through Oklahoma?” McGrue’s voice reminded Dixie of dead leaves scudding along a sidewalk.

  “Habit, mostly. Dann travels all over the state on sales calls, but his favorite route is 1-45 north. He’ll know the speed traps and the stretches where he can make the best time. He’ll know 1-59 is currently rerouted for construction. Forty-five is flat, multilane, easy traveling.”

  “Could head south.”

  “Could.” While she told him about Dann’s former residences in Montana and Calgary, and her lookouts along the Mexico border, McGrue took some time over the menu, finally settling on steak, four eggs, hash-brown potatoes, biscuits with gravy, a side of ham, and double apple pie à la mode for dessert. Dixie regarded the skin stretched tight over his rangy frame. Maybe it was true that grapefruit juice burned fat.

  “Dann was here in town as late as seven o’clock,” she said. “A neighbor saw him come home, stay a few minutes, then leave, carrying a couple of plastic grocery bags. I cruised his favorite hangouts. No sign of him or his car.” Dann’s Cadillac had been impounded after Betsy’s death. Now he drove a four-year-old Chevy sedan with a patched fender.

  “Might ditch the car,” McGrue drawled in his raspy voice.

  “Probably would, if he knew we were looking for him.”

  “Now it’s we, is it?” McGrue took a handful of Jolly Rancher candies out of his pocket and laid them on the table, lemon, sour apple, and one peach. He slid the peach across to Dixie with a bony finger, the nail glossy and perfectly trimmed. Then he thumbed the cellophane off a lemon candy and crunched rather than sucked it. The sound made Dixie’s teeth hurt.

  “I was hoping you’d put out a ‘suspicious vehicle’ watch,” she said, “along with a ‘do not attempt to apprehend,’ of course.” Asking the highway Patrol to watch for Dann’s car was her best bet for picking the skip up fast, without an official contract. But it was also like issuing McGrue a Gold Card for paybacks.