I flew back down the hall to the elevator and cursed its slow descent every inch of the way.
As the door opened to the ground floor, I was startled to see Dixie talking to the guard. She smiled and said, “Perfect timing. Ready to go?”
“Call an ambulance,” I gasped. “It’s Chan. Up at the Swingtyme place. I think he’s dying!”
7
« ^ » “Even in our own times, with all the industrial appliances and the more extended knowledge which characterizes this epoch of modern civilization, a satisfactory bed has been realized only within the last few years.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
For the rest of the night, without car keys or hotel room, I was a helpless participant in someone else’s drama.
Later I was glad that I’d been there for Dixie when she had no one else, but she hadn’t immediately needed my shoulder and I felt like an intruder.
While the guard summoned help, she left a message on her friend Pell’s machine, asking him to send the baby-sitter home and to hold the fort till she got there. Then we followed the ambulance over to the hospital and sat outside the ER while the trauma team worked to stabilize Chan’s breathing.
As a nurse took down his history and questioned Dixie about his allergies, I remembered that I’d seen a gold medic alert on one of his neck chains.
“He’s allergic to several things,” Dixie said, “especially bee and wasp stings. He almost went into shock the last time he was stung.”
Allergies? Could allergies have been the reason for his heavy breathing that spring in Maryland and not my fallen-woman status?
Dixie looked at me guiltily when the nurse was gone. “I must have just missed him. He knows I keep a stash of antihistamines in my office for my own hay fever, especially with pine pollen so bad right now. Maybe he felt an attack coming on and came looking for me.”
“If he’s that allergic, he must carry his own supply,” I argued.
“Maybe. Thank God Lynnette inherited Evelyn’s constitution and not his.”
Here in the ER waiting room with us were a black mother and an obviously feverish child who leaned against her mother’s comforting bulk with listless apathy.
A defeated looking middle-aged white couple—he in overalls, she in a faded print housedress—waited for someone to see them. The wife’s eyes were pools of anxiety and she kept asking him in low tones how he felt. He merely grunted and sat hunched over with his crossed hands pushing against his abdomen as if to hold back the pain that left him gray-faced and sweating.
Two shabbily dressed white teenagers whispered together on a corner couch and a large black woman with a dazed expression kept going up to the receptionist every few minutes to ask, “He’s gonna be okay, ain’t he?”
The black receptionist was patient, but obviously harried. “They still haven’t told me anything, Ms. Robinson. I promise I’ll let you know the minute they do.”
Two very bloody and very drunk white adolescent boys came rushing through the door, propelled by a white High Point policeman. They yelled that they were the victims of police brutality, probably maimed for life, and that their fathers would have his badge. The trouble was not that they really believed it but that their fathers probably believed it, too.
They alternated their belligerent threats with whining complaints and rather than sit there and listen to them, I went out to hunt up some coffee. It took a while but what I finally found smelled delicious and when I got back, Dixie sipped hers appreciatively.
“What happened to the Hardy boys?” I asked, but she looked at me blankly and I realized that very little about this waiting room was registering.
To take her mind off Chan, I said, “You mentioned earlier you wanted some legal advice?”
She sighed. “It seems so petty now with Chan like this.”
“It concerns him?”
She nodded. “I wanted an update on grandparents’ rights. You heard him earlier. Jacaranda’s merging with a company in Malaysia and he’s going to take that job. Uproot Lynnette and haul her off to Kuala Lumpur halfway around the world where I’ll never see her except in the summer. If I’m lucky.”
Tears filled her eyes. “She’s all I have left of Evelyn. What if he finds someone out there and remarries? What if she’s jealous of his first marriage with Evelyn and won’t let me visit Lynnette? Don’t I have any rights at all?”
“Well…” I said cautiously, “as a judge, I’m not allowed to give legal advice, but if you want to hear what a friend thinks—”
Dixie slumped back in the ugly plastic chair, discouraged. “I know, I know. As long as he’s a good father, I have no real rights, just what he chooses to give me.”
“Is he a good father?” I asked.
“Materially, yes.”
“But not emotionally?”
“How do I know, Deborah?”
“Don’t you?”
She gave a reluctant grin. “You really haven’t changed, have you? Okay. You’re right. He dotes on her and she adores him right back. But then, most females do adore Chan.”
“Like Drew Patterson?”
“Exactly like Drew. She’d marry him tomorrow and don’t I wish! She’s crazy about Lynnette, too, and even if they did move to Malaysia, she’d see to it that I stayed part of their life. But Chan—”
She broke off as a nurse came out and asked if we’d come with her. She led us into a small room furnished with only a few chairs and benches. A doctor in green scrubs was waiting for us. His face was young but his weary eyes were ancient.
“Mrs. Babcock?” There was pity in his voice. “I’m truly sorry to have to tell you this… We did everything we could. Unfortunately, Mr. Nolan didn’t make it.”
“Didn’t make it?” Dixie looked at him blankly, as if his words held no meaning.
I was just as uncomprehending. “He’s dead?”
That laughing, dancing, sexy hunk of manhood?
“I’m truly sorry,” the doctor said again. “He was already in anaphylaxis when he got here and we just couldn’t reverse it. Were you with him earlier? Was he stung or did he accidentally eat something he’s allergic to?”
“Not that I know of.” Her chestnut hair swirled around her face as she shook her head.
“Those chocolate brownies?” I offered, trying to be helpful. “Nuts?”
She shook her head even more vigorously. “Foods never seem to bother him all that much. It’s the histamines and pollen, of course.”
She looked at the doctor. “Pine pollen’s so bad this time of year, but he was taking something for it. Could he have taken too much?”
The doctor looked dubious. “His condition didn’t quite present that way, but I’ll check. Who was his allergist?”
“I’m not sure. Is there a Dr. Harrison over in Winston?”
“Amos Harrison. Right. I’ll give him a call.” He patted Dixie’s hand, murmured more apologies, then left us with a nurse to finish filling in the forms.
“You’re Mr. Nolan’s next of kin, right?” the nurse asked.
“Next of kin? No, not really. He’s my son-in-law. I guess my granddaughter? But she’s only six. She couldn’t possibly—”
“Oh, no, ma’am. It would have to be an adult. What about his parents?”
“They’re both dead, but his sister’s in Maryland. I don’t have her number with me though.”
Dixie looked at me in grief and dismay and I told the nurse, “Let me take her home now and she’ll call you in the morning with that information.”
The nurse nodded sympathetically. “Certainly.”
More than ever I felt the loss of my purse and keys and the lack of a hotel room. I realized now that Yolanda Jackson at the shelter must have been the “she” that Savannah had thought could help me with a bed. I offered to try to call her, but Dixie wouldn’t hear of it, so I followed her out into the parking lot and again the cool night air felt like spring and new beginnings.
As we drove to her ho
use on the north side of town, Dixie spoke of Chan and her daughter Evelyn, of how she had never been able to trust his salesman’s charm, his smoothness, his easy way with women.
“He even flirted with me, for God’s sake. His own mother-in-law! I knew he wouldn’t be faithful, but you couldn’t tell Evelyn. Not that I ever tried to, once she was married to him. She had to have known though. Women couldn’t keep their hands off him. They throw themselves at him and he doesn’t—didn’t—always dodge. After Evelyn died, poor little Drew almost made herself sick before he started seeing her.”
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.”
I was impressed and said so.
“Some companies are so brazen,” said Pell, “that they openly brag that they don’t bother to fund a design department. They just send their engineers to spy on what Stanley or Wesley Allen or Thomasville are doing. Look at how Lexington sued Vaughan-Bassett. Somma Mattress got hit last year with a ninety-five million judgment for stealing a water mattress design from General Bedding. John Charles Design just won a patent information infringement against Queen International over a curl-arm design. Things like that go on all the time.”
“I had a run-in—literally and physically—with some guy who was trying to steal headboard designs tonight,” I said.
As I described my adventure at the Stanberry Collection, Pell poured coffee, a rich dark roast, and smeared a stack of hot toasted muffins with cream cheese and a drizzle of honey. It was a perfect snack for that time of night and I bit into it gratefully as conversation looped from Chan, to the Market, back to how to tell Lynnette that her daddy had died.
“The exhibit next to Swingtyme had potted azaleas around their doorway,” Dixie said. “Maybe a bee stung him. Or a spider. If only I hadn’t left!”
“Or if I’d come back a few minutes earlier,” I said, knowing I’d forever wonder if those few minutes would have made much difference.
We told Pell how I’d lost my purse and keys and he seemed interested in every detail of my bizarre encounter with the legendary Savannah.
“That’s where I’ve seen you!” I exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to think why you look so familiar. I saw a picture tonight of you with Savannah and Jay Patterson.”
“I know the picture,” he said. ‘Taken down at Mulholland. She’s had studio and office space there from the beginning even though she’s always worked freelance. We were on several projects together and she taught me a lot. Brilliant lady. Unstable, of course, but brilliant as hell. Right up to the time she smashed her car.”
“Jay Patterson said something about that tonight—that Drew was nearly killed? They were in a car wreck?”
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