Death by Chocolate

by G. A. McKevett

  Savannah sighed. “O-o-okay. Whatever.”

  Cordele’s saintly smile evaporated, and she turned to face Savannah. The sisters were practically nose to nose.

  “I have to tell you right now,” Cordele said, “that having someone say, ‘whatever’ to me pushes one of my major emotional buttons. I mean, I feel like I’ve just been disrespected and my opinion dismissed when someone says that. It really, really, deeply upsets me, and I think you should know that.”

  Savannah stared at her sister. Bit her tongue. Counted to ten. But it didn’t help. She still said it: “Okay. Whatever.”

  “Don’t take this wrong, Savannah,” Tammy whispered, “but I can’t stand your sister.”

  Savannah stood in her living room, strapping on her shoulder holster. She glanced quickly toward the kitchen, where Cordele was eating some of Tammy’s yogurt, having found nothing else in Savannah’s refrigerator that was “it for human consumption” as she had not so tactfully worded it.

  “Don’t feel bad. I don’t know anybody except Gran who does.”

  “Your grandmother likes her?”

  “Well, I don’t know if she actually likes her, but she loves her. She has to; she’s her grandmother. It’s like a grandma rule.”

  Tammy smirked. “Isn’t there a sister rule like that, too?”

  “Nope. No such law on the books.”

  Savannah opened the coat closet door and reached up to the top shelf for her Beretta.

  Tammy tugged at her sleeve. “You’re not really going to leave me here with her all day, are you? Entertaining your nutso relatives is just so-o-o not a part of my job description.”

  “Take off. Go on over to the Maxwell estate and wait for me outside by the gate. I’ll be along shortly and you can help me help Dirk.”

  “Really?” A look of relief flooded her face. “Oh, that would be so great!”

  “Go.”

  Tammy nodded toward the kitchen. “Does she know you’re leaving her to go to work?”

  “Nope. Haven’t broken the news to her yet. She thinks we’re going to spend the afternoon rehashing old family grievances.”

  “Are you going to tell her now?”

  Savannah drew a deep breath of resolve. “Yep.” ‘Then I’m outta here, right now.”

  Savannah watched as Tammy hightailed it out the front door. “Chickenshit,” she mumbled after her.

  She strolled into the kitchen, where Cordele was scraping the bottom of her yogurt cup. “Is that enough lunch for you?” she asked. “I’d be happy to make you a sandwich, warm up some soup, or....”

  “No, this is plenty for me.” Cordele gave Savannah’s figure a quick glance up and down. “I worked through my food issues long ago. I no longer use it as an anesthetic to dull the pain of my childhood woundings. It’s nothing more than fuel to me now.”

  Bully for you, Savannah thought, but she smiled and said, “That’s lovely, dear. Then I won’t feel obliged to rush home and make fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner. I’ll just throw together a salad and pick up a quart of brown rice from the local Chinese takeout.”

  Cordele scowled. Then her scowl deepened. “What do you mean ‘rush home’? Where are you going?”

  “To work.”

  “When?” She seemed to notice the Beretta in its holster for the first time. “Now?”

  “Yes.” Savannah fought to keep the anger out of her voice but wasn’t at all successful. “I should have been working this morning, but I wasn’t. So I may be out until late tonight. I hope you don’t mind entertaining yourself while I’m—”

  “Entertaining myself? Do you think I spent six hundred dollars for plane fare and came all the way out here for entertainment?”

  Savannah walked over to the sink, grabbed a tumbler out of the cabinet, and poured herself a glassful of water from the refrigerator. Meanwhile, she warned herself to speak kindly, gently, tactfully. Treat your sister as you’d want to be treated yourself, Savannah girl, she could hear her grandmother saying.

  She drank the water slowly, giving herself time to carefully compose her words, while her sister stood there, glaring at her, hands on her hips.

  Finally, she set the glass on the counter, turned to Cordele, and said, “To be honest, I don’t really know why you came to see me. All I do know is that my own life is very complicated right now. I’m working on something that’s very important and—”

  “More important than me? More important than your relationship with your own flesh and blood?”

  “No-o-o. My family is more important to me than my work. But right now, I need you, my family, to understand my situation. A woman was murdered.... a woman who hired me to protect her. And now I have to find out who killed her. I have to find out so that they won’t kill anybody else. I have to find out so that the people who loved the victim can have closure.”

  “Revenge, you mean. You’re not a cop anymore, but you’ve still got that vengeance mentality. Look at you, standing there with a gun strapped on your body. The person who killed her is probably a tormented soul who needs help and compassion more than punishment, but you don’t see that. You’re only interested in catching them and having them locked up—or worse.”

  Savannah stared at her sister and shook her head. “Don’t you lecture me about vengeance, young lady. You don’t know squat about it. Unless you’ve had someone that you love murdered, ripped away from you by some no-good sonofabitch who thinks he’s got the right to take somebody else’s life, don’t you shoot your mouth off about revenge. What you call vengeance is another person’s justice. And don’t you tell me that justice isn’t important, because justice is what I do! As long as it’s within the bounds of the law, justice is a righteous, necessary thing!”

  Cordele looked shocked for a moment. Then angry. Then the scowl on her face gradually faded, replaced by a sappy, condescending smile. “I can see that you’re deeply upset by me expressing my opinion on this issue.”

  “Really? Go figure.”

  “That’s understandable, considering where you’re coming from.”

  “And where might that be?” Savannah asked, although she was fairly certain that Cordele’s answer would make her want to feed her her teeth on a knuckle sandwich.

  “You’ve always had a simplistic, black or white, plus or minus, view of the world.... the good guys versus the bad guys. And of course you see yourself as one of the good guys.”

  Savannah’s eyes narrowed. “When it comes to murder and the apprehension of murderers, I am one of the good guys. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty of the bad ones. You wouldn’t want to run into them in a dark alley.”

  “So you see it.” Cordele leaned back in her chair and folded her hands primly on the table in front of her. “Of course, in my studies in the science of psychology, I’ve learned that the human psyche is far more complicated than your elementary viewpoint. There are no bad people in this world, only misguided ones who—”

  “Oh, can it, Cordele. What the hell do you learn about anything sitting in a classroom? I could show you crime-scene pictures that would make you puke. I could tell you things that your ‘misguided’ monsters have done to innocent people that would scar your soul. If you want to feel sorry for them, go right ahead. I’m going to go to work. I’m going to find out who poisoned a woman to death, and I’m going to stick their ass in a sling and wring ‘em dry. And if that offends your enlightened sensibilities, tough.”

  Savannah turned on her heel and stomped out of the kitchen. She paused at the hall closet to grab her jacket.

  Cordele was right behind her. “When are you coming home?” she demanded.

  “I told you already. Late. Read a book, watch TV, and order yourself a pizza. There’s some money in the cookie jar.”

  “I don’t eat pizza. It’s junk food.”

  Savannah snatched her purse and keys off the table by the door. ‘Then check the fridge. I think there’s a head of lettuce in there and some carrots. You can—” She pau
sed at the door, debated whether to finish her statement, and decided not to. She left before telling her sister what she could do with the vegetables in question.

  Granny Reid would have been so proud.

  Chapter

  10

  When Savannah arrived at the gates of the Maxwell estate, Tammy was sitting in her Volkswagen bug parked right across the road. Savannah waited for her to run across the highway and get into the passenger’s seat before she drove up to the key pad and punched in the security code.

  “I didn’t know you had that,” Tammy said. “When did they give you the combination?”

  “They didn’t. I saw it written on a piece of paper and taped to the inside of the pantry door. Discreet, huh?” The gates swung open, and she drove the Mustang through.

  “Not very. Gee.... anybody could have seen it there.”

  “Exactly. Doesn’t narrow down our list of who might have been on the property lately.”

  Tammy thought for a moment. “And with the murder weapon being something she ate, it could have been planted almost anytime.”

  “Please don’t remind me. I’m depressed enough as it is.”

  Savannah drove past the barn-converted-studio and saw Dirk’s battered Buick parked behind the building.

  “Let’s start here,” she said. “We’ll see how far Dirk’s gotten on his own this morning.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” was the cry that greeted them when they walked through the studio doors. On the far side of the cavernous room, Dirk was on his hands and knees behind a partition, sifting through what appeared to be a pile of garbage. ‘You said you were going to give me a hand, and I’ve been working my tail off all morning by myself with no help from anybody.”

  “And you haven’t come up with anything,” Savannah replied as they walked across the room to join him.

  “How do you know I haven’t?”

  “Because you’re crankier than usual. If you’d found anything good, you’d be more cordial.”

  She knelt on the floor beside him and saw that it was indeed the studio garbage that he was searching. The trash consisted mostly of paper, but enough coffee, sodas, and chocolate cake had been added to the mix to make it a disgusting mess. He was wearing a pair of surgical gloves. Though he had no hygienic standards about sifting through garbage with his bare hands, she knew he was concerned about contaminating anything he might find in the way of evidence.

  She dug in her purse for a pair of gloves for Tammy and another for herself. They both slipped them on and began to rummage with him. He appeared to be collecting bits of chocolate cake and stashing them in an evidence bag.

  “I had to go to the airport to pick up my sister,” she reminded him, as she tossed a coffee-soggy piece into his bag.

  Tammy knelt on the other side of Dirk and wrinkled her nose at the smell of the garbage. ‘Yeah, and hanging out with Cordele isn’t exactly fun.”

  “Oh yeah.” Dirk nodded thoughtfully. “I remember that one. Met her in Georgia when we were there last year. She’s the one with the stick up her—”

  “Yep, that’s Cordele, all right,” Savannah replied. “And she’s come to visit me for an undetermined length of time.”

  “Lucky you.” Dirk picked up another hunk and dropped it into the bag.

  “Yeah, lucky me,” Savannah said. “I’ve got a homicide to investigate and don’t have to hang around the house and get my head shrunk.”

  “She’s a shrink?” He folded the bag closed, took a black marker from his pocket, and began to scribble pertinent information on an orange label, which he then affixed to the bag, sealing it.

  “No. She’s studying to be one.” Savannah continued to sift through the mess, but saw no more cake fragments. “She’s just learned enough to be dangerous—to herself, that is. Someday she’s going to tell the wrong person that they’re passive-aggressive and they’ll forget all about being passive, if you know what I mean.”

  “I can understand how she might bring out the worst in a person.” He stood and brushed the remnants of garbage from the front of his jeans. “Why don’t you put her on a plane and send her home?”

  “Easier said than done,” Tammy muttered. “She’s a Reid, and they don’t obey very well.”

  “What’s that?” Savannah said.

  “Nothing.” Tammy looked around at the empty, relatively dark studio. “Where’s your Crime Scene Unit? Why aren’t they helping you today?”

  “More budget cuts from our dear mayor.” Dirk walked over to a box he had stowed near the stage and dropped the bag into it. “We’ve only got three guys on it—actually, one’s a broad—and they’re on the other side of town, dusting for prints at a house burglary.”

  “Since when does a burglary take a backseat to a homicide?” Savannah wanted to know.

  “When it’s the mayor’s sister-in-law who got burgled.”

  “Oh.” Savannah peeled off her gloves and tossed them into the trash heap. “So, you figure it was the cake?”

  “That’s the last thing she ate.” Dirk walked onto the set with its green marble counters and cozy, stained-glass cupboards. ‘That redhead producer—”

  “Kaitlin Dover?” Savannah followed him reluctantly onto the set. Only hours ago she had been kneeling right there—in that spot between the counter and the oven—holding Eleanor Maxwell, watching her die.

  “Yeah, Kaitlin.” Dirk produced another bag from inside his jacket and took the remainder of the cake, plate and all, that was sitting on the counter, and shoved it into the bag. “She was by earlier, and I had her show me the film—the one they were taping when it happened.” Tammy joined them on the set. “Could you tell anything from looking at the tape?”

  “Just that she made the cake, took a few bites, got sick, and kicked the bucket.”

  “Wait a minute.” Savannah tapped her fingers on the marble. “A bunch of us had a bite of that cake. I ate some myself, and I didn’t get sick.”

  “You aren’t on heart medications,” Dirk reminded her. “It was the interaction that did her in, not the stuff itself.”

  “But I should have had some sort of symptoms if it was that concentrated in the cake.” Savannah turned to Tammy. “What would the symptoms be? Do you remember from that Internet article you read?”

  “I don’t think it said anything about overdose symptoms, but I remember it was used for colds, to clear congestion and...”

  Savannah raised one eyebrow and poked Dirk in the chest with her forefinger. “Hot toddy, my hind end. You didn’t cure me, big boy. I’ll bet you a plug nickel it was that bite of cake that dried me out.”

  Dirk sniffed. “Well, that’s appreciation. See if I ever make another one of my special toddies for you.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said it wasn’t what dried up my nose. You wait till they run some tests on that cake and you’ll see that it’s full of that stuff.”

  Dirk looked around the kitchen. “Well, just in case it isn’t, I’ve gotta take everything else that I can find around here in for tests, too. Anything remotely edible.”

  Savannah began opening cupboards, but most were empty. “Why do I get the feeling they didn’t actually do much cooking here in this kitchen?”

  “They didn’t,” Dirk replied. “I already talked to Kaitlin about that. She said that Eleanor put most of the stuff together down at the house and brought it up here after it was cooked.”

  “Sure, that makes sense.” Savannah found some pots and pans, but they were dusty and obviously hadn’t been moved recently. She closed the door and kept looking as Dirk and Tammy did the same. ‘You know... I’ll bet the cake we ate wasn’t even the one she mixed up here on the show.”

  “What do you mean?” Dirk said, his head in the refrigerator.

  “I mean... she mixes up one here on camera to demonstrate how it’s done to her audience, but when she puts it in the oven to ‘bake,’ she takes out the one that’s already been baked and serves it.”
/>   Tammy nodded. “Sure. You can’t wait for it to bake on a TV show.”

  Dirk had donned another pair of gloves and was placing the items from the refrigerator into yet another evidence box. “Well, that may be true, but we still have to take all this crap in and have it checked, just in case.”

  “And all the stuff from the kitchen in the house,” Savannah said. ‘They’re just gonna love you at the lab.” Dirk growled, “If we can drag it all down there, the least they can do is run the lousy tests.”

  Savannah grinned. ‘Yeah, you be sure to put it to ‘em just like that. There’s nothing like that Coulter charm to ensure cooperation.”

  This time when Savannah stepped onto the mansion’s verandah with Dirk and Tammy in tow, the three mini-hounds from hell didn’t even bother to get up from their comfortable chairs where they were having their early afternoon snooze. Killer simply opened one eye, blinked lazily, and closed it, then shoved his nose under one paw.

  “Vicious creatures,” Tammy said. “Until they get to know you. Then they’d lead you straight to the family heirloom silver and help you carry it out of the house.”

  “It was the garlic-flavored chicken livers that brought them around,” Savannah told her. “One sandwich bag of that spread three ways and they’re in my power forever.”

  “Food....” Dirk opened the front door, which was unlocked, and walked inside. ‘That’s how you control all of us.”

  “Ah, yes, the power of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and cream gravy.” Savannah grinned.

  Ordinarily, she would have added chocolate cake to the end of that list, but for the moment, she was turned off to the whole idea—a definite first for her. She didn’t know if she could ever eat chocolate cake again. This murderer was going to get caught and pay the price for that alone.... if not for Lady Eleanor’s demise.

  “Hello,” Dirk called. “Anybody here?”

  “In here,” came a voice from the kitchen.