A Few Drops of Bitters

by G. A. McKevett

  “If you aren’t careful,” Savannah said under her breath.

  “I didn’t hear that.” Dirk thought for a moment. “The movie videos are enough to get a search warrant on the Beckers. We’ll take their computers and tablets. I’ll hire you as a freelancer, Tammy, on the county’s dime. Then you can ‘rediscover’ everything you’ve got here. Okay?”

  Tammy cackled with glee and rubbed her hands together. “I can’t wait! Maybe I’ll find even more!”

  Savannah looked at her brother and his wife and felt a flood of pride rising in her. “You two are amazing!” she said. “You did all of this in the wee hours of the morning with a fussy, teething child.”

  They all turned and looked down at the little red-haired fairy princess, who was stretched across her uncle Dirk’s lap, sound asleep.

  “She’s resting,” Dirk said. “Regaining her strength.”

  “For all the shrieking she’s going to do tonight,” Waycross said.

  Tammy just groaned.

  Chapter 33

  It took Dirk two hours to get his search warrant. Another hour for him and two uniforms to show up at Melissa Becker’s house, then Patrice’s, and take their electronic communication devices. They also seized the clothing that Melissa had worn to the theater the night of the burglary, the crowbar from her BMW’s trunk, and some gloves that had been tucked into the wheel well. With the gloves they found a plastic grocery bag, containing a small box of assorted food color dyes, and a half-full, disposable, water bottle.

  Once Tammy had the computers and tablets in hand, she needed only thirty minutes to “regather” the nails-in-their-coffins messages that they had been too foolish to delete.

  By noon, Dirk had three arrest warrants in his hand and joy in his heart.

  “Wanna come along?” he asked Savannah as he prepared to go to the station house to interview the three suspects who had been detained for questioning.

  He didn’t have to ask twice.

  * * *

  “Patrice first,” Dirk told Savannah as they walked down the hall toward the interrogation rooms.

  “Good choice,” she replied. “We’ve already spent enough time with Melissa to know she isn’t likely to fold easily.”

  “More like an iron rod than a cheap lawn chair in that regard.” Dirk paused outside the door, his hand on the knob. “Wish me luck,” he said.

  Savannah was taken aback. Cocky Dirk was proud of his well-earned reputation for being the quintessential interrogator. He managed to get suspects to confess who hadn’t spoken a word to others who had questioned them. Since when did he think he needed luck?

  “You got this, darlin’,” she said. “If there’s anything you know how to do, it’s squeeze somebody and get them to confess to their evil deeds. I’m glad you didn’t become a priest. You’d have been a terror in a confessional.”

  He gave her a quick, lusty look up and down. “I’m glad I didn’t become a priest either,” he said and gave a little growl.

  He punched in the door’s combination, opened it, and stepped inside with Savannah. The room was only a bit bigger than a broom closet with torn gray padding on the walls, a utilitarian steel table in the center with four folding, metal chairs around it.

  Patrice Conway sat on one of them, her head down, and her beautiful, red hair flowing around her shoulders.

  When she looked up at them, Savannah saw none of the anger she had felt coming from the young woman, as she had when she’d seen her at the clinic.

  No, this Patrice reminded Savannah of the one she had seen fleeing the party in Joya del Mar. Frightened, sad, with tear-reddened eyes.

  “Hello, Ms. Conway,” Dirk said as he took a seat across the table from her. “Thank you for waiting to speak to me.”

  “I was told I didn’t have a choice,” she replied.

  “That’s true. But thank you anyway.”

  Savannah sat down next to Dirk. “Hi, Patrice. We’ve been running into each other a lot lately,” she said. “Not under very nice circumstances though.”

  “Are you a police officer, too?” Patrice asked her.

  “No. Not anymore. I’m married to Detective Coulter here. I’m just along for the ride.” When Patrice didn’t respond, Savannah added, “Is it okay with you if I sit in? I can leave if you’d prefer.”

  Patrice shrugged. “I guess it’s okay. Probably won’t matter much either way.”

  Dirk laid a large folder on the table. Savannah could see it contained the printout sheets that Tammy had given him.

  “Ms. Conway,” he began, “I assume you know why you’re here, or at least have a good idea.”

  “Not really,” she replied, unconvincingly.

  “We’re investigating the homicide of Stephen Erling.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she instantly shot back.

  “Oh, but you do, Ms. Connelly. You know al-l-l about it.”

  “No! I don’t. I—”

  “Patrice, I know that you poisoned him with a drug called pentobarbital. I know that you put it in a pretty, antique, green crystal glass.”

  Savannah watched her carefully and saw a look of panic cross her eyes. She glanced toward the door, as though wishing she could run through it and never stop running.

  “Would you like to know what else I know?” Dirk asked.

  All he received was a weak nod.

  He picked up the folder, opened it, and started laying the papers side by side in front of her.

  “These are from your social media pages. Some are private messages between you and Melissa Becker.”

  Patrice looked at the papers and gagged. Savannah got ready to move aside with haste, if Patrice looked like she was going to throw up and direct it toward her.

  “How did you get those?” she asked, breathing heavily. “Those are private!”

  “I had a subpoena to search your house. That included your computer. A computer specialist was able to pull all these pages up for us and print them out.”

  Patrice covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

  Dirk leaned across the table, closer to her, and said, “I just want to hear your side of it, Patrice. You seem like a nice lady, and I doubt you’d do a thing like that unless you had a really good reason.”

  Patrice dropped her hands from her face and stared across the table at him with something that looked like eternal gratitude on her face. “I did!” she exclaimed, nodding vigorously.

  “I never would have even thought about doing something like that to a regular person. But Stephen wasn’t regular. He was evil, that guy. Pure evil!”

  If Savannah had been chewing gum, she would have swallowed it and choked on it. A confession? Already? Wow! After only maybe thirty seconds into the interview!

  This had to be a record, even for Dirk!

  “I believe you,” Dirk told her with what appeared to be total sincerity and deep-seated compassion. “I know enough about Stephen Erling to understand why you did it. Extenuating circumstances and all that.”

  She just nodded, so he continued to press her. “I might be able to help you if you just tell me why,” he continued. “He really hurt you, didn’t he?”

  “He hurt a lot of people. Especially women. He used us, then threw us away.”

  “I know the type,” Savannah said. “They think they’re God’s gift to us gals, and they’re actually a curse.”

  “He was!” Patrice’s tearful, green eyes had the look of someone who was experiencing much-needed validation after a long, dry spell. “He just didn’t care about anybody but himself.”

  “I can’t stand guys like that,” Savannah told her. “They cause so much damage. Narcissists.” She glanced down at the folder. “You had some links about narcissists on your page. I looked at them and instantly thought of Stephen. He ticked every box. A total narcissist. Don’t you think?”

  “I know he was. He was so selfish. So hurtful.”

  “You loved him at one time,” Dirk told
her. “I could tell by what you said to Melissa in those private messages. Nobody hates a rival that much unless you’re really in love.”

  “I fall in love way too easily,” Patrice admitted. “Always have. I can’t believe I betrayed a good friend like Carolyn for a dirtbag like him. Yes, I hated the ‘other woman,’ until I realized she was just another one of his victims.”

  “But eventually,” Savannah said, “you and Melissa became close.”

  “We did,” Patrice admitted. “Once we started sharing what it was like to be used by that bastard, we sort of bonded over it. He hurt us both in the same way. It helped a lot to know I wasn’t the only woman in the world stupid enough to believe in him, to let him into my heart.”

  “Whose idea was it to kill him?” Dirk asked. “Yours, Melissa’s, Carolyn’s?”

  “I don’t remember. We were just joking about different awful things we wished we could do to him. I don’t think we meant any of it. We were just blowing off steam. You know?”

  “Yes, I know,” Savannah tried to sound convincing, and Patrice seemed to be convinced. “It’s easy to talk about something and not realize that your words are actually leading you down a destructive road. All of a sudden, you realize that your words became actual plans and plans became actions. Then you’re sunk.”

  “Are you telling me,” Dirk asked, “that you didn’t actually intend to murder Stephen Erling?”

  “Yes! That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t want to. After I read about that nurse botching her suicide with the pentobarbital, I chickened out. What if we just made him sick? He would have figured out it was us, and he’d have killed us.”

  “Was he that bad a dude?” Dirk asked.

  “Worse. The worst person I ever met.”

  “The poison,” Savannah said. “How much of it was your idea and how much was Melissa’s?”

  “I thought of it. I knew about pentobarbital because I’ve helped Carolyn administer it to animals when necessary there in the clinic. I was joking with Melissa about what a nasty guy Stephen was and how Carolyn had told me she was thinking of getting rid of him. At the time Carolyn told me, I thought she was serious, like she was actually thinking of killing him. Later, I realized she was just a depressed, abused wife talking. When she’d said she needed to ‘get rid of him,’ she just meant divorce him. She never would have killed him. She wasn’t strong enough.”

  “You thought you were helping your friend?” Savannah said, pouring on the so-sweet sympathy.

  “I was helping all three of us. Carolyn, Melissa, myself, and who knows how many others?”

  “I understand,” Savannah told her. “You really didn’t feel like you had a choice.”

  “That’s exactly right!”

  “You had so many reasons to hate him on so many levels. Anyone would have, after him betraying you like that.”

  “Yes! It was a betrayal, too. He told me he was going to ask Carolyn for a divorce so he could marry me. I bought it all. But even the ring he gave me was fake. Told me it was a pre-engagement ring. I found out he bought mine and two others at the same time. I know he gave Melissa one. Who knows who received the third one?”

  “Let me get this straight, Patrice,” Dirk said thoughtfully. “You were the one who stole the pentobarbital out of the clinic’s medicine chest the first time. But it was Melissa who stole even more when she faked the break-in.”

  “I really shouldn’t speak for them.”

  Dirk gave an airy wave of his hand. “That’s okay. I’ve talked to them, and they told me all about it.”

  “They did?”

  “Sure,” Savannah said. “They told us all about how they staged the movie theater alibi, how Melissa changed clothes in the bathroom, then left, did the burglary, and came back.”

  Having been raised by Granny, Savannah felt a rib-jab from her conscience as the lie tumbled out of her mouth. They hadn’t spoken to Melissa or Jerry yet, figuring Patrice would be the softest egg to crack.

  They were right. She was swallowing it all in one big gulp.

  “They told you!” she gasped. “I can’t believe they told you! They kept telling me not to say a word and then they . . . Wow!”

  “They spilled their guts,” Dirk said, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head in his most pseudo-casual pose. “We even know about how they put red food coloring and water into the half-empty bottle of pentobarbital to make it look full again.”

  “Man, they really did blab!” Patrice shook her head in amazement.

  “Did you hear what happened to Loki, the Great Dane you guys loved so much there at the clinic?” Savannah asked in a less friendly tone.

  Patrice cringed. “I heard. Poor dog. I feel really bad about that. In fact, that’s part of why I tried to pull the plug, talk Melissa and Jerry out of it. It just didn’t feel right anymore. I told them I was having second thoughts. Big-time. That it wasn’t as easy to administer a fatal dose as I’d thought. But Jerry threw a fit. Wanted Melissa to demonstrate her love to him by killing Stephen. She really wanted to work things out with Jerry. God only knows why, because he’s a loser, too, but she wanted him. No accounting for taste, I guess.”

  Savannah thought that any woman who had fallen so deeply in love with a jerk like Stephen, and her friend’s husband to boot, shouldn’t talk about anyone else having bad taste in men. But she kept her opinion to herself. The interview was going swimmingly. She didn’t want to flub it now.

  “I believe you when you say that you didn’t want to go through with it, Patrice,” Savannah told her in her most comforting voice. “I remember the way you looked the day of the party, when you and I ran into each other in front of the Erling mansion. I saw the tears in your eyes. You weren’t some gleeful murderer, running from the scene of your crime. You felt bad about what you’d just done.”

  “I did! I felt terrible. I was worried someone else might drink it, even though Melissa assured me that Stephen never let anybody drink from that green glass. He even took it with him in his suitcase when he traveled.”

  “How did you get the pento-stuff into the glass without anybody noticing?” Dirk said.

  “The funny thing is, I never really thought I’d get the opportunity to do it. Such a big crowd! People everywhere. The kitchen was full of cooks and waiters. I just stayed in the background and watched. I saw them fill up the glasses on a big tray, and one of them was the green one. I couldn’t believe my luck when everyone just sorta walked away from that tray and left it on a sideboard for a minute. It didn’t take long to dump a little of the champagne out of his glass and into the others, then put the drug in.”

  “Girl, you have got nerves of steel.” Savannah said cheerfully, as though congratulating her.

  “Not really. I was worried and so nervous, I was shaking. I was afraid he’d see the pinkish tint in the medicine. But with the champagne diluting it, and the glass being green, it wasn’t that obvious.”

  “Why were you the one stuck doing the actual deed, if Melissa and Jerry were the ones who were actually insisting on following through with it?” Savannah asked.

  “Because, if they’d shown up there, Stephen would have had a fit! He was beside himself just seeing me. Plus, Jerry wouldn’t have been caught dead in the house of the man who seduced his wife. Stephen hated me, too, but at least I had an excuse to be there. To pick up my check.”

  “Did Carolyn know you were going to do it?” Dirk asked, his face hard, his eyes inscrutable.

  “No. She didn’t know before. Later, I think she figured out that it had been either me or Melissa.”

  “Carolyn didn’t ask you to do it for her?” Dirk pressed again.

  “No. Not at all. I keep telling you, she didn’t know. Carolyn is a wonderful person. I love her. She was another one of his victims. But an innocent one.”

  Savannah felt a knot in her throat, one that had been tightening more and more over the last couple of days, loosen and release. Brody’s friend wasn’t a murdere
r. The boy could continue to visit the clinic and do the work he loved with someone he loved and respected.

  What a wonderful turn of events, a great way to close a case.

  But Dirk wasn’t finished yet. “One more thing, Patrice. I’ve just gotta know. Why did you throw the Saint Bernard’s urine in his face?”

  “Because I confronted him about Melissa. I told him that he’d led me on, gave me reason to believe I was his one and only. He’d told me he was crazy about me and wanted a future with me. Finally, I realized the only person Stephen Erling was crazy about was himself.”

  Savannah couldn’t maintain the pretense any longer. “Yeah, Stephen was a jackass’s hind quarters. No doubt about it. But killing a man? Your dear friend’s husband? Premeditated murder?” She shook her head and gave a tsk-tsk. “Really, Patrice? You should’ve been satisfied with the dog pee.”

  Chapter 34

  If anyone deserves a perfect wedding day, it’s my little Alma, Savannah thought as Dirk parked the Buick on the brick driveway in front of Ryan and John’s magnificent Moroccan-style castle, situated on one of the highest mountain peaks in the county.

  The glorious old place once known as Qamar Damun—Arabic for “Blood Moon”—was new only to Ryan and John, as it had been built in the 1920s. During Prohibition, it had been a glittering mecca, attracting the brightest stars of the silver screen, the most influential politicians of the day, and members of European royalty, as well as the most feared and revered mob bosses.

  In spite of its beauty, Qamar Damun had been notorious as the ideal place for decadent parties and corrupt dealing of all sorts. A glamorous and glittering venue for the intermingling of all the vices known to humankind and humans who were obsessed with practicing them.

  But today, Qamar Damun had been transformed. After yet another murder had occurred there, Ryan and John had taken pity on the old place, purchased, and lovingly restored her.

  They had even given her a new name, Qamar Jadid, which meant “New Moon.”

  “What better place for Alma and Ethan to get their new start in life,” Savannah said as she picked up her beaded bag, took out her compact, and checked her mascara.