by GA McKevett
“Is he still alive, this so-called ‘adoptive dad’ of yours?”
“No.”
“And his wife?”
“They’re both gone. They’d also adopted a girl, before me. She was a lot older than I was. She did quite a bit of the cooking and cleaning. She and I hardly ever spoke a word to each other, but I guess she’s the closest thing I ever had to a sister.”
“Do you two talk?”
“She used to live in Twin Oaks, till she got married. Soon after that, she and her husband moved to Chicago. We haven’t stayed in touch. I think she’d just as soon forget her whole childhood, me included. And I can’t blame her.”
“I’m sorry, darlin’,” Savannah said. “Thank you for telling me all that. I know it’s not easy, talking about stuff from the past. Stuff that hurts.”
“You’re my wife now. You’ve got a right to know.” He turned and winked at her. “Now be honest, you’ve suspected more than once that Dirk Coulter was a real bastard.”
She looked into his eyes and saw the pain that belied the stupid joke. “I’m married to Mr. Dirk Coulter,” she said in her most indignant version of a Southern drawl. “And as his wife, I’ll ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you discuss him with me. He’s a fine gentleman, no matter what his parentage. And I’m proud to say, he rose above his raisin’.”
Suddenly Dirk slowed the Jaguar down and looked the other way, finding something terribly important to watch to his left. She heard him sniff a time or two. When he turned his full attention back to the road ahead, she could see his eyes were filled with tears.
“I love you, Savannah,” he said.
“I love you, too, darlin’. And I wouldn’t take a million bucks for you, no matter what’s written on your birth certificate.”
A few minutes later, Savannah and Dirk arrived at the Island Lagoon Motel.
Just as Tammy had described it, the place was lagoon-free. In fact, it had no landscaping at all. The one-story, ten-unit no-tell motel had all the charm of a long, rusty cracker tin with windows.
“I’ve made better buildings than this with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs,” Dirk said as he pulled the Jaguar into one of the parking spaces in the pothole-ridden parking lot.
“It makes that fleabag motel where we spent our honeymoon night look like the Taj Mahal,” she replied.
They got out of the car and walked to the lobby. The room was no larger than ten by ten feet and had dark, fake walnut paneling of a style and quality that Savannah had only seen in the basements of her childhood friends back in Georgia.
In front of the counter was a display rack, featuring brochures from the myriad attractions in California, from Alcatraz to Disneyland, and on down to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The pamphlets were the only bright spot in the room.
Behind the counter stood a woman who looked like she had never been anywhere but that one spot. Not even in front of the counter, let alone to Alcatraz or San Diego. She looked tired—of her job, to be sure, and maybe even of her life.
“Yeah?” she asked.
While Savannah hesitated, wondering exactly how to answer such a complex question, the woman sighed, leaned forward on the counter, and said, “Thirty bucks an hour. You go over the hour, even five minutes, it’s another thirty. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Savannah replied, “but we don’t want a room. We want to talk to Hank.”
“He’s busy.”
Dirk stepped up to the counter and leaned on it, which put him and Miss Hospitality nearly eye to eye. “We’re busy, too,” he said. “And we can see that you’re just working your fingers to the bone back there on . . . well . . . whatever it is you do.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and placed it on the counter. “So this might help pay for your time.”
“My time’s worth more than that.”
“It’ll take you five seconds to tell us where Hank’s at,” Dirk said. “Let’s see now, that’s”—he did the math in his head—“over fourteen thousand dollars an hour for your valuable time. I’ll bet you never made that kind of money before in your life.”
She reached for the twenty, but Dirk put his finger on it.
“He’s cleaning room eight,” she said.
“I thought he was the handyman here,” Savannah said. “Not a maid.”
“Hank does it all.” She reached down again for the bill. This time, Dirk released it. She nabbed it and shoved it into her jeans pocket.
As Savannah and Dirk walked out of the lobby, back into the parking lot, and headed for the rooms, Savannah said, “What do you call a guy who cleans a motel room or house or whatever?”
“I don’t know, but you can’t call him a ‘maid.’ A male ‘maid’ just ain’t natural.”
“Then what would you call him?”
“A ‘cleaner-upper’? Hell, I don’t know.”
“If he’d clean my house for me, I’d call him ‘lover boy.’ ”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
They found Hank Jordan in room eight, as promised. The door was open and even before they entered, they could see him inside, yanking the sheets off a bed.
He looked about as thrilled with his life career choice as the gal at the desk. In his early fifties, generously enhanced around the midsection, a mop of long, dirty hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail, he peered at them from behind glasses that had blotches of something that looked like green paint on the lenses.
Savannah noticed it matched the blotches of green paint on his black sweatshirt. At least he was accessory coordinated.
“Is your name Hank?” Dirk asked him as he and Savannah stepped into the room.
“Maybe it is, but maybe it ain’t” was the reply.
Dirk turned to Savannah. “Don’t you just hate it when their mothers don’t teach them their names before they start school?”
“It’s pitiful,” she said. “Plumb pity-full.”
She turned back to Hank, who had just finished putting fresh sheets on the bed and was in the process of picking the bedspread up off the filthy, stained carpet and putting it back on the bed.
“Y’all don’t put clean bedspreads on, too, when you change the sheets?” she asked.
He smirked, and she could see he was missing a front tooth. “The smile of a quarrelsome man,” Granny would say.
“You’re kidding, right?” he replied. “We don’t put on clean bedspreads every time, and neither do the five-star hotels in the real world.”
“Ewww.Gross.”She had to make a mental effort to put that disturbing bit of information aside and contemplate it later—if she dared .
Hank threw a couple of pillows onto the bed; then he grabbed a squirt bottle and a dingy rag off the floor and headed for the bathroom.
Dirk followed after him, his badge in hand. “I’m a cop,” he said, “and I’ve gotta ask you a couple of questions about something that happened here on the island two days ago.”
“I didn’t see anything or do anything,” Hank replied as he gave the sink what Savannah called “a lick and a promise” with the dirty rag.
“You need to take this seriously,” Dirk said, using his deepest, most officious voice. “A very bad crime was committed.”
“Not by me,” Hank replied.
“Well, let’s don’t act like you’re above it,” Dirk snapped. “I’ve looked at your record and you ain’t spotless. Sorta like that sink you just kinda cleaned there.”
“I did some stuff, back in my day. But nothin’ lately.” He grinned again. “Nothing the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on.”
“Where were you day before yesterday, in the morning?”
“Was that when it happened?”
“When what happened?”
“The bad crime you think I might’ve done.”
Dirk’s eyes narrowed. “Hank, my man, I’m gettin’ sick and tired of you real quick here. Now—day before yesterday, mid-morning—where the hell were you? Spit it out, or you’ll
be missing both of your front teeth.”
“I was in jail.”
Savannah and Dirk stared at him, silently, for a moment.
“ ‘In jail’?” Savannah repeated. “And you had the gall to tell us just now that you’ve been clean for years.”
“I have. Just ’cause I was in jail doesn’t mean I was guilty of anything. You know that.”
“Why were you in there?”
“The chief of police herself was questioning me. I’ve been real popular with you cops this week. She seemed to think I had something to do with somebody or the other getting shot. But I didn’t. And I couldn’t have done whatever else you think I did.”
He turned away from them and gave the lid of the toilet the same brief swipe as he’d offered the sink.
“Just ask Chief La Cross if you don’t believe me. She knows I was there from eight o’clock in the morning till one in the afternoon.”
He picked up the drinking glass on the counter and, with the same rag that he had just used on the sink and the toilet, he wiped out the inside of the glass, then set it back down.
“Oh no! That does it!” Savannah said, suddenly rushing out of the room. Once outside, she leaned against the side of the building and took some long, deep breaths. “I’m gonna be sick,” she said to herself, “and I’m sure as shootin’ never staying in a motel again. Not for the rest of my born days!”
“Why do I feel a bit like Daniel walking into the lion’s den?” Savannah asked Dirk as they got out of the Jaguar and walked up to the modest stucco building bearing the sign SANTA TESLA POLICE DEPARTMENT.
“Me too.” He slipped his arm around her waist and gave her a little hug. “This may not go down in history as the smartest thing we ever did together.”
“Do you think she meant it about arresting us and putting us in separate cells?”
“Something tells me she’s just mean enough to do it.”
“Well, she ain’t got the corner on ‘mean,’ so she’d better watch out. Sneaking around, taking pictures of us like that, when we didn’t know it! She’s got a lot of gall, if you ask me.”
Dirk chuckled. “How many times, Miss Private Detective, have you done the exact same thing?”
Savannah thought it over for a second, then sniffed. “That’s different. It’s all in the line of duty. A necessary evil. Stuff like that.”
“But mostly, what makes it okay is that you do it. It’s not all right when she does it.”
She scowled up at him. “I have to tell you, I’m not happy with this new trend we’re developing here, this business of you winning arguments. We’ve gotta nip it in the bud before it gets outta hand.”
“Don’t confuse you with the facts?”
“Something like that.”
They reached the building, and Dirk opened the door. She entered to find the tiniest reception area she had ever seen in any police station. Unlike some of the hardcore facilities Savannah had worked in during her career, this place looked like it was set up to handle maybe one jaywalker a year.
As she flashed back on Dr. Glenn’s minuscule office, it occurred to Savannah that, here on this island, if a building wasn’t a place created for luring in tourists, not a lot of money or effort was spent on its construction or décor.
Maybe what William Northrop had said was true. Perhaps Santa Tesla Island’s inhabitants were poor and in need of some form of economic stimulus.
Was a casino complex the answer? She decided to leave that up to wiser minds than her own. For right now, she had a killer to catch and a police chief to confront.
She turned and saw a tiny desk and, behind it, a sight that made her skin crawl. Turning to Dirk, she whispered, “Oh no! Look at that! It’s Kenny’s evil twin!”
Dirk took one look and said, “Oh, man. This is freaky.” He hummed a couple of bars from the Twilight Zone theme song.
At the morgue in San Carmelita, Savannah had experienced far more than her share of unpleasant encounters with a boorish buffoon named Kenny Bates. From the minute Kenny had laid eyes on Savannah, he had been hopelessly, pathetically in lust with her. Unfortunately, he never bothered to conceal the fact every time she walked through the morgue doors.
From the too-small uniform on a too-rotund body to the bad toupee, this guy was Kenny to a tee.
He nodded to Dirk, but his eyes lingered on Savannah. And more specifically, her bustline.
“Yeah? What can I do you for?” he asked; then he snickered at his own tired joke.
“Not for a million dollars and the Hope Diamond,” Savannah replied, giving him a cold stare—which he missed entirely because he was still soaking in the view.
“Hey, over here!” Dirk snapped his fingers. “You wanna put your eyeballs back in their sockets and take care o’ business here, guy?”
Kenny’s clone shook his head slightly, as if coming out of some sort of fantasy—the details of which Savannah hoped never to know.
“We need to talk to Chief La Cross,” Dirk told him. “Now.”
“She ain’t here” was the professional response. He turned back to Savannah. “But you can talk to me anytime you want to, pretty lady.”
“Oh, Lord, just kill me now,” Savannah whispered. “Or, better yet, kill him, if you ain’t too busy workin’ out that world hunger problem.”
“That pretty lady is my wife,” Dirk said. “So you’d better spend the rest of our little conversation here looking into my eyes. Otherwise, one or both of yours are gonna be black. Got it?”
The guy appeared to grasp Dirk’s meaning because, with effort, he turned and looked straight at him. “I told you the chief’s not here.”
“Yes, and I heard you,” Dirk said.
“Then what else do you want from me?”
“I’ve got one more question for you. Listen close now, ’cause it’s a toughie. Where is she?”
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
Savannah stepped closer to him, the expression on her face deeply unfriendly. “No, you don’t have to. But whether you do or not, we’ll find her. When we do, I’m going to complain to her, long and hard, about how you practically stared a hole through the front of my blouse and were quite unprofessional with me.”
“But—but . . . I . . .”
“Something tells me that my complaint won’t be the first one she’s ever gotten about you. I’ll just bet that your job’s hanging on by a thread right now. If you get fired, with your abundance of charm and the bad economy around here, you’d be lucky to get work as a dogcatcher.”
The passion in his eyes flickered; then it died a quick death. He gave her a nasty look, then turned to Dirk. “She’s having lunch at the Lobster Bisque down on the water in the harbor,” he said. “Now, why don’t you two leave and let me get back to my work here. I’m a busy man.”
Savannah glanced at the video game on the computer. “Yeah, get back to all that protecting and serving. Make the world a safer place.”
As Dirk and Savannah walked out of the station and headed for the Jaguar, she said to him, “That was so spooky. I guess we all do have a double somewhere in the world.”
When Dirk opened Savannah’s car door, she said, “Maybe they were identical twins separated at birth.”
“Would you blame the parents? Who could stand to raise two of those?”
“Hey,” she said, pausing with one foot in the Jag, “I just thought of something. The chief’s at the Lobster Bisque. I knew that sounded familiar.”
He thought for a moment. “Oh yeah, isn’t that the place that Northrop said was his favorite restaurant, too?”
“I’m sure it is.”
They looked at each other, weighing any significance.
“Probably doesn’t mean a thing,” she finally said. “How many really great restaurants could there be on this little island? It’s probably ninety percent of the population’s favorite eatery.”
“True. Besides . . . La Cross? Ugh.” He shuddered.
“Yeah. I a
gree.”
Chapter 16
Savannah and Dirk stood on the sidewalk and looked across the street at the Lobster Bisque, a simple but charming seaside establishment. It looked as though it had once been a nice house, someone’s vacation cottage. Now with its exterior painted an icy white and with deep blue umbrellas shading its outdoor tables, the place looked most inviting.
Apparently, a lot of Santa Teslans thought so, too, because not a single table was vacant.
But it wasn’t the ambiance of the place or even the capacity crowd that captured Savannah’s and Dirk’s attention. It was the table to their far right, in the rear, by some planted palms—the table least visible from the street.
It was the table where Chief of Police Charlotte La Cross and William Northrop were sharing lunch and a couple of cocktails.
“Well, well, well,” Dirk said, grinning at Savannah. “I wouldn’t say for sure that they’re up to no good, but you have to admit this is an interesting little rendezvous.”
“This is going to be fun. Just watch.” Savannah took her phone from her purse and crossed the street. Her spine was pool stick straight, her stride determined.
Dirk followed close behind her as they darted between the pedestrians, bicycles, motor scooters, and omnipresent golf carts. He stayed right behind her as she wove her way among the tables.
She stopped a few feet from La Cross’s table and pointed the camera of her cell phone directly at the chief and her luncheon companion.
At first, the two diners failed to notice, so absorbed were they in their conversation, food, and drinks. But the instant La Cross glanced up and recognized Savannah and Dirk, the cozy, happy expression fell off her face.
Savannah could almost imagine that she heard it plop into her umbrella-adorned pink cocktail.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing there?” La Cross snapped as she jumped to her feet, knocking her chair over backward in the process. It fell to the floor with a tremendous clatter, which caught everyone’s attention.
Suddenly the busy, bustling, noisy restaurant was as silent as a well-tended library. The crowd sat, wide-eyed and all ears, taking in what was going on at their neighbors’ table.
