by Tamar Myers
Then I excused myself and trotted off to my private storage area where I keep one of those refrigerators that is so small that you have to mash a loaf of bread to get it in. But there was nothing in there but an open package of three moldy slices of turkey bologna, and a jar of crusty brown mustard.
Frantically I rummaged in my desk drawers for some sort of libation, but alas, no bottle of Pernod magically appeared. It was not altogether a wasted effort, however, because I did find—mixed up with some rubber bands and paper clips—some candies I’d swiped from the bowl at Red Lobster.
“Peppermint, Purvis?” I asked politely.
He shook his massive head which, I noticed with dismay, was glistening with sweat. If any of that got on my baronial armchair, Purvis was going to pay. As for the consequences to me, in retrospect, five hours is not such a long drive with a good audio book along.
“What’s this all about, dear?”
“I—uh—hell, Abigail, this isn’t easy for me.” Purvis extracted a white cotton handkerchief from his left pants pocket, and much to my relief, began mopping his brow.
“Take your time, dear,” I said, glancing at my watch.
He mopped and swabbed in relative silence for several minutes, and then without any further warning, took the plunge. “I came to apologize.”
There is no taking back a gasp, so I pretended it was the prelude to a yawn. “Pardon me. I guess I didn’t sleep well last night. Now what was it you were saying?”
He crammed the sodden handkerchief back into his pocket. “You heard me, girlie.”
“I liked it much better when you called me Abigail.”
He stared at me. “You don’t believe in cutting folks any slack, do you?”
I pulled up a Victorian side chair and sat down. “I believe in showing folks respect.”
“Yeah, well, respect has to be earned.”
I glanced at my watch again. “Let’s not argue, shall we? So, you came to apologize. Well, apology accepted.”
The porcine eyes blinked. “You did hear me!”
“Of course. I just wanted to hear you say it again. I would gladly trade that chair you’re sitting in for a tape recorder. Now, what exactly is it you’re sorry for?”
He took a dry handkerchief from his right pants pocket and mopped again before answering. “Maybe I was a little hard on you when you stopped by this morning. I guess I thought maybe you were blaming me for the tea set not being a genuine William Cripps.”
“You said it was.”
“I said that’s what I thought it was. There’s a big difference.”
“That’s easy for you to say, since you didn’t lose any money.” A twenty-thousand dollar goof allows one to be petulant, if you ask me.
“Abigail, you know my policy. It’s standard for the industry. All sales are final. We don’t guarantee the authenticity of any of our merchandise, because this business covers too many areas for any one person to become an expert on everything. That’s why y’all get the opportunity to examine the merchandise before an auction.”
Unfortunately I had no retort for that.
“However, I have decided to make an exception this one time.” Purvis paused to attend to his personal needs. With both handkerchiefs soggy, he decided to use his shirtsleeves. “I paid five grand for that set, Abigail. How about I tear up your check, and you and I split the cost to me?”
To my knowledge, I have been that shocked only twice before. The first time was when Buford asked me for a divorce so that he could marry the Tweetie Bird, and the second time was when Erica Kane was impregnated by Dmitri. That’s Dmitri on “All My Children,” not my cat by the same name.
“Split the cost?” I sputtered. “You?”;
Purvis waved a pudgy hand. “You’re a good customer, Abigail. And like I said, this is a one-time exception.”
I gave the side of my head a couple of hard raps with the base of my palm. Something was not computing. Purnell Purvis of Pineville was incapable of committing random acts of kindness.
Purvis saw my gesture and had the temerity to chuckle. “Truth is, Abigail, I’ve been wanting to do something nice for you for a long time.”
A really hard rap on the other side made no difference. “You have?”
He nodded. “I’ve had my eyes on you since the first day you stepped into my auction barn. That little lady is mighty special, I told myself.”
“You did?”
“Yes, ma’am. I could see right away that you weren’t like any of the other women dealers in Charlotte.”
“Leave my height out of this,” I snapped.
He slapped a padded thigh. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’ve got fire in you, little lady. Spunk. That’s what I like in a woman.”
That was certainly news to me. I suspected that Purvis had been married at least once, maybe twice. He has two loutish sons—as different from each other as rap and music—and the word is they have separate mothers. That was the extent of my knowledge. For all I knew the man had a plethora of wives and concubines holed up in the nether reaches of his auction barn, and they kowtowed and catered to his every whim. I doubted if any of them had spunk.
“Finding your harem ho-hum, dear?”
He laughed, and his eyes were replaced by a pair of navels. “I’m not married. Haven’t been for twenty years. Of course now if the right woman came along—” He leaned forward and deliberately touched me on the knee.
Of course I was shocked, but having been primed by his offer to help absorb my loss, I was not immobilized. I still had enough presence of mind to slap the offending hand away.
“If she was the right girl, she’d run for her life!”
“That’s what I like about you, girlie. You give as good as you get.”
“Then get this—get lost!”
“Yesiree, I like a woman with fire.”
I stood up, and Purvis being a southern gentleman, born and bred, stood up as well. He had eyes again.
Suddenly it occurred to me that perhaps I had gone too far. “Did you mean what you said about splitting your cost?” I asked.
“I don’t go back on my word, little lady. That’s one thing you can count on if you hook up with me.”
“Good, because I’d rather hook up with Godzilla.”
“I love it!”
The exertion of standing had set off a new round of perspiring, and Purvis was now on his second sleeve. A good hostess would have offered him a box of tissues, but alas, the one on my desk was empty. Mama’s unexpected departure had seen to that.
“Would you mind stepping outside, dear?” I asked politely. “This is a hardwood floor, and I just had it redone last summer.”
“Anything you say, little lady.” He stuck out his hand, which I had no choice but to shake. It felt like a clump of kelp fresh from the sea.
Purvis was halfway to his car before it occurred to me that I may just have been bought off. Hornswoggled by the best of them. What a clever ploy it was to offer me remuneration, even a partial one. And then the flirting! That was a stroke of genius. I had become so discombobulated that I had completely forgotten to press for a description of the mysterious vendor.
I raced after him and caught him just as he was opening the door to his Chrysler LeBaron. Without thinking, I put a restraining hand on a wet sleeve.
“Now that we have this special relationship,” I panted, “you can tell me who the vendor was, can’t you?”
He turned slowly. “What’s the difference? You’re only going to be out twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“This could be the same man who sold the set to my mother. I’d like to ask him a few questions.”
“Little lady—” Purvis said, and collapsed in the street.
7
I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. Purnell Purvis did not hit the pavement with a thud. His collapse was slightly more gradual, like a soufflé settling when the oven door has been slammed. While he settled, I stood and stared with my mo
uth wide open. Needless to say, I am not particularly good with emergencies.
Major Calloway, whose emporium is just across the street, was the first one on the scene. The old goat can really sprint. He got there in time to cushion Purvis’s head with his hands and guide it gently down to the hot pavement. A suspicious person might even assume that the major was watching and waiting for just that moment. Fortunately I am not the suspicious type.
“Call 911!” the major barked.
I did what I was told. It took only a minute or two, but when I returned a crowd had already gathered. Just where all these folks were until the major appeared, will always remain a mystery. Something similar happened to my Aunt Marilyn in Atlanta. A car smashed into a telephone pole in front of her house at three in the morning. Aunt Marilyn was the only one on the scene, administering first aid and getting blood all over her nightie, until the police showed up. Then every light in the neighborhood came on and the gawkers came pouring out of their houses like ants to a picnic basket.
Anyway, it was impossible for me to push my way through the band of rubberneckers that surrounded the fallen Purvis, so I wormed through at a lower strata. A woman yelled when her purse strap caught on my ear, and a grammar school boy kicked me in the ribs, but I ignored them.
Purvis was still prone, like a beached whale in a business suit. The major, dressed in a khaki uniform of British colonial issue, replete with pith helmet, was cradling Purvis’s giant head in his arms and crooning something intelligible. Perhaps a Punjabi lullaby. It was a scene straight out of a Fellini movie.
“I’m back,” I rasped.
The major didn’t look up. “You call 911?”
“They said five minutes tops. Is he breathing?”
“Barely.”
“Can’t you do CPR?”
“It’s been years since I took the course, but I’ll give it a go,” the major said.
He laid Purvis’s head gently down on the pavement and straddled him. With his knobby knees protruding from the baggy khaki shorts, and a look of terror in his eyes, the major looked like a small child who had just mounted a pony for the first time.
Mercifully the paramedics reached us before the major could do any irreparable damage. And let me tell you this, these Charlotte guys and gals really know their stuff. By the time they were loading him into the ambulance, Purvis was fully conscious. Unfortunately he was articulate as well.
“Abigail,” he whispered.
I looked around stupidly. The crowd was certainly large enough to supply two of us.
“Abigail!”
I edged closer. Sure, Purvis had plotzed on my pavement, but I had nothing to do with it. Now that I was in the process of breaking up with a Charlotte detective, a deathbed accusation was the last thing I needed.
“Closer,” he croaked.
The paramedics waited patiently, the stretcher half in and half out of the yawning ambulance. Apparently this sort of drama was routine. I gave the throng my best nonchalant shrug and took a full step closer.
“Abigail, remember our little arrangement?” Purvis asked in a voice loud enough for even those at the back of the mob to hear.
“Yes,” I mumbled, but my lips were as tightly sealed as Howdy Doody’s.
“Well, it’s off!” he practically shouted.
“You lying snake!” I hissed.
Purvis slowly raised himself on his elbows. At the angle he was pitched, it was a wonder he didn’t topple facedown on the street.
“You—” he said, and fell back against the stretcher.
His eyes were closed.
“Thank God he didn’t die.” Wynnell wiped the corners of my mouth with the hem of her blouse. Since her homemade outfit was made from pinned-together table napkins, it didn’t matter.
I looked past her and through the front window of Applebee’s at Carolina Place Mall. Not a mile away Purnell Purvis was resting quietly in the cardiac ward of Mercy Hospital South. His prognosis was good. The man had had a mild heart attack, but there were no complications. In fact, and this puzzled his doctors, portly Purvis had no history of heart disease. His vast bulk aside, there was no reason for him to have had one on Selwyn Avenue.
Peggy put a fist-size bite of quesadilla into her mouth. She’d been the first to arrive, and hadn’t waited for anyone else before she ordered. This was vintage Peggy who was addicted to both food and sex and obviously wasn’t getting any of the latter.
“Abby,” she asked, “that wasn’t you Purvis was talking to, was it?”
“Don’t be silly,” Wynnell said loyally.
“What do you mean?”
“Our Abby doesn’t get along with Purvis. Everyone knows that.”
I turned from the window and shot my friend a warning look. It was in vain. Wynnell, bless her heart, is a woman without guile. This is possibly an admirable quality, but it can be hazardous when in the hands of unprimed friends.
“Exactly what I was getting at,” Peggy said, and treated me to a glimpse of masticated Mexican. “I mean, don’t you think it was odd that Purvis wandered down to Selwyn and just happened to have his heart attack in front of Abby’s shop?”
The major snorted. “It wasn’t odd at all. Purnell Purvis didn’t just happen to collapse in front of the Den of Antiquity. He went in to see Abby first.”
All eyes turned to me. There were seven pairs in all. The entire gang had assembled for supper at Applebee’s to talk about the day’s happenings, Purvis’s heart attack in particular. This alone struck me as strange, since a communal supper was not a regularly scheduled event for us. What made it even stranger was the fact that the major had been the one to suggest it.
“I didn’t do anything to him,” I wailed. “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles. I’ll even wear white after Labor Day if I’m lying.”
C. J. gasped. “Never wear white after Labor Day, Abby. My mother did that once when I was in the seventh grade, and the next thing I knew she was gone. Poof, just like that. I didn’t see her again for several days.”
“What happened?” Bob Steuben won’t admit it, but he has a soft spot for our junior member. I think she reminds him of his little sister up in Toledo. He is also keenly aware that Rob finds C. J.’s yarns as irritating as a stiff label in a new shirt.
“She stepped outside and got lost in a snowstorm.”
“In Shelby, North Carolina?” Rob asked. For the first time I could remember the Rob-Bobs were not sitting together. In fact, they were seated at opposite ends of our double table.
Calamity Jane nodded emphatically. “It was the worst winter in a hundred years. Snow was already up to the top porch step, and it was blowing so hard you couldn’t see past your outstretched hand.”
“Lord have mercy!” Bob brayed. I had to give him credit for trying to sound southern.
“Oh, Mama was all right,” C. J. hastened to assure us. “She’d just gotten done pouring brandy on our Christmas fruitcakes—Mama always made them from scratch—when she heard what sounded like a knock on the kitchen door and went to answer it. She was holding the biggest fruitcake when the wind blew her away. It didn’t blow her very far, of course. Just off the porch and into a snowdrift. But then she got turned around and headed for the barn instead of the house. We found her three days later when the weather cleared. Not only had Mama eaten all of the fruitcake, but she was still a little bit tipsy from the brandy. She had no recollection of what happened.”
“The poor dear,” I said against my better judgment.
“Oh, she was fine—honest. She had Moonjumper, our cow, to keep her warm. She smelled a little funny, though, until we made her take a bath the next week. Moonjumper, I mean, not Mama.”
Rob rolled his eyes. “I thought you said she ate the biggest fruitcake.”
“Rob!” Bob boomed.
It was time to do a little diffusing. “What do you recommend?” I asked Gretchen, who was scanning the menu through horn-rimmed spheres the diameter of my water glass.
Gr
etchen’s gaze shifted from the menu and slowly focused on my face. In the meantime, six pairs of eyes focused on Gretchen. Our taciturn troop leader was about to dispense another pearl.
“What sort of arrangement did you and Purvis have, Abby?”
“What arrangement?” I croaked.
“I was standing close to the ambulance. Purnell Purvis said for you to remember y’all’s little arrangement.”
“Do tell,” Peggy squealed, unnecessarily spraying me with quesadilla crumbs.
I looked frantically at Wynnell for help, but she was giving me the fish eye. My friend claims that I never confide in her until the entire southern half of Charlotte knows my business.
“Yeah, tell,” Rob said. He was clearly miffed at me for having called him jealous earlier.
I was trapped. To stall further, or deny the conversation, was to dig my way deeper into the quicksand of suspicion. “If you keep your curtains open,” Mama often said, “folks don’t need to wonder what’s inside your house.” It was time to open the drapes as wide as I could.
“Purvis did come by to see me this morning—”
“Aha,” the major barked, “I told you so.”
“He offered to return the money I paid for the William Cripps. Well, not all of it. The arrangement is we split his cost.”
“Then who gets to keep the set?” Rob asked.
“I do.”
“Hey that’s no fair. I’ve never been allowed to return an auction item.”
Of course Rob was absolutely right. It wasn’t fair. And if anybody deserved a break on returns, it was Rob. As owner of the Finer Things, truly the finest shop in Charlotte, he handed over a fortune each week to pertinacious Purvis.
“He’s right,” Bob grunted.
Rob cast his life-partner a grateful look. Alas, it was too fleeting to lead to reconciliation.
“Isn’t there something in our by-laws that forbids favoritism?” the major whined.
