Death by Chocolate

by G. A. McKevett

  And her cold was back with a vengeance. She sat up in bed and held her head in her hands, willing the throbbing in her sinuses to go away. It didn’t. When she bent over to retrieve her house slippers from beneath the bed, she nearly blacked out.

  “Oh, joy. Just what I need,” she mumbled. She wondered if there was any sort of rule against having whiskey hot toddies for breakfast. She could just imagine the joy Cordele would have tattling to teetotaling Granny Reid.

  She could hear her now: I hate to have to tell you this, Gran, but Savannah has developed a substance addiction. Alcohol, I’m afraid. You know, I recently read an article in Psychology Digest about the likelihood of the children of alcohol-abusing parents developing addictions of their own. And since Savannah refuses to deal with her parental abandonment issues—like I’ve done, by cutting my hair off—it was only a matter of time till she became a boozer.

  Yes, Savannah could picture it all.

  So she decided to settle for coffee.

  “Leave me alone. I feel like crap, and I hate the world right now,” Savannah told Tammy when she tried to show her a website she had found. Savannah shuffled by the desk without even a glance in her assistant’s direction and made her way to her cushy chair, coffee [ mug in hand.

  As usual, Tammy’s cheerful morning mood couldn’t be dampened. It couldn’t be dampened with a fire hose. ; She smiled brightly and said, “No problem. Sorry your cold came back. Can I get you something? Goldenseal or ginseng?”

  “Peace and quiet?” she grumbled, sinking into her chair.

  “You got it.”

  In less than three seconds, both cats had left their perches on the windowsill and were climbing all over her, begging to be petted.

  “Get off me, you foul beasts. Just because Mommy makes a lap doesn’t mean you have to use it. Scram.”

  “Boy,” Tammy muttered, “you are in a bad mood.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Tammy left her chair at the desk and clapped her hands together and whistled. “Come here, Cleo. Atta girl, Di. Aunt Tammy will feed you. Mom’s sick and grumpy this morning.”

  Savannah said nothing, but bared her teeth and growled.

  Tammy chuckled as she led the cats into the kitchen... obviously terrified.

  Savannah closed her eyes and held the coffee mug under her nose. She breathed deeply and could almost smell something through her stuffiness. Almost, but not quite. She took a drink and decided that coffee didn’t taste like much if you couldn’t smell it.

  After enjoying less than two minutes of quiet, blissful solitude, she found her reverie interrupted when she heard the back door open and Cordele saying something to Tammy.

  “Lord, help me,” she whispered. “I’ve only got about one nerve left, and it’s frazzled. If she gets on it, I might kill her.”

  Cordele came into the living room, dressed in a black leotard and tights. Savannah was shocked to see that beneath her usual costume of a baggy white blouse and a saggy dark skirt Cordele actually had a nice figure.

  “Good morning,” her sister said between sips from a water bottle. “Tammy says you’re not feeling good this morning.”

  “I have a cold. I’m tired. It’s been a tough week. That’s all.” She decided to stick her head out of her shell for a moment and attempt to be civil. “You look good in that getup. What are you doing?”

  “My yoga. I do it every morning to calm my mind, to harmonize my spirit and my body.”

  Savannah tried to summon a modicum of enthusiasm. She couldn’t find any, so she faked it. ‘That’s good.”

  “It also helps with muscle toning and weight control. You should try it sometime.”

  Savannah glared at her with red, burning eyes. “I have tried yoga, Cordele. I live in southern California, for pete’s sake. We’ve all tried everything at one time or another. We’re very open-minded people.”

  “Obviously you didn’t stick with it,” Cordele replied, scanning up and down Savannah’s body. “Discipline is the key.”

  “Eh....” Savannah mumbled, “go sit on a Lifesaver and tell me what flavor it is.”

  Cordele bristled like a banty hen. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “No, I heard what you said. It was that obscene Lifesaver insult you used to say when we were kids. I remember the first time you ever said that to me. I was devastated.”

  “No!” Savannah held up one hand. “Don’t you even start with me this morning, girl, or I swear I’ll breathe on you. I’ll cough on you and sneeze all over you, and give you this friggin’ cold. You just aggravate me some more and see if I don’t! Back off. I mean it!”

  Tammy hurried into the living room, having overheard. She looked from one sister to the other, but they were locked in a glaring match.

  “Cordele,” she said. “Would you like to have some breakfast? I believe we have fresh strawberries and yogurt in the refrigerator. Some wheat germ to sprinkle on the top. What do you say?”

  Eventually Cordele broke the glare standoff and stomped away into the kitchen.

  “Thank you,” Savannah mouthed to Tammy.

  Tammy just smiled—her sunny good-morning smile. And Savannah thanked her stars above that she had a friend who was observant, perceptive, compassionate.... and a morning person.

  Chapter

  12

  No sooner had Savannah pulled into the parking lot at the station house than Dirk came bopping out of the back door. He hurried over to her Mustang and stuck his head in the open window on the passenger’s side.

  “Were you watching for me from the window?” she asked. “Or have you developed ESP in your old age?”

  “I was watchin’. Hillquist is in the squad room, and I figured you’d just as soon avoid him if possible.”

  “Like creeping cruditis,” she said.

  Since Police Chief Norman Hillquist had fired her from the police force several years back, he had been her least favorite person on the planet. “Dirty, sucking, pond scum” was the way she usually referred to him. And that was to his face. Behind his back she was less kind.

  “Thanks for sparing me,” she said. “Get in, and I’ll drive.”

  He hesitated. Like most men she had met, Dirk preferred to be the one behind the wheel. Usually she didn’t care either way. But today she wanted at least the illusion of control over some part of her life.

  “Get in,” she said. “The lab’s all the way across town. Just think how much gas money you’ll save.”

  He opened the door and plopped himself inside. Giving her a double sideways take, he said, “What’s with your nose bein’ all red? You got your cold back or somethin’?”

  “No,” she said. “I was putting on lipstick, and I missed.”

  “And your eyes are puffy, too. I hate to tell you this, but you look like shit, Van. You should be home, not running around with me.”

  “My sister is in my home.”

  He smirked. “So you prefer my company to hers, huh?”

  “Yeah. Sorry state of affairs, no?”

  They drove along in silence for a few minutes until they reached the industrial area of town. Savannah looked around at the endless rows of soulless gray buildings and asphalt parking lots.

  “I remember when this was all orange groves and strawberry fields,” she said. “Look at it now.”

  “Progress. It just keeps marching on. Pretty soon, San Carmelita will just be another part of L.A.”

  “Don’t even say it.”

  She pulled into one of the lots and parked next to a dull gray building with an equally dull gray door. The only clue to its occupancy was the Great Seal of California and the county emblem next to the doorbell.

  Dirk pushed the button, and a nearby intercom sputtered and crackled.

  “Yeah?” asked a tired, harried-sounding voice. “Coulter,” Dirk replied, sounding equally droopy and irritable.

  “Come in.”

  A buzzer beeped, and
he pushed the heavy steel door open. Inside were the offices of the county’s forensic laboratories where crime-scene evidence was processed.

  Over the years Savannah and Dirk had brought everything here from hairs and fibers to chips of paint from cars and casts made of tire prints, bloodstained clothing, murder weapons... and a pet pygmy goat whom they’d suspected of eating a pair of rubber gloves that had been used in an armed robbery.

  And Eileen Bradley and her team of technicians had handled it all. Not always gracefully or enthusiastically, but they had gotten the job done. A middle-aged woman, big-boned, with long gray hair that she wore in a braid down her back, Eileen wasn’t somebody to mess with. Her subordinates were pretty much terrified of her, and that was just the way she liked it.

  But she and Savannah had always gotten along. Even after Savannah left the force, she knew she was welcome to drop by the lab and chat. As long as she didn’t get underfoot or touch any of the equipment.

  “I told you not to come by before noon,” Eileen barked at Dirk as she came out of her cubicle, which was about twice as big as the other three cubicles. All gray. But Eileen’s had an Elvis calendar pinned to the partition wall.

  “I was in the area,” Dirk said. “I just thought I’d drop by and—”

  “You’re crowding me.” Eileen walked up to Dirk and poked her finger at his chest. ‘You’re being pushy, and I told you to knock that off. You can wait for your results, like everybody else.”

  Ordinarily, Dirk would have decked anybody who poked him in the chest, but in Eileen’s presence, he wilted like a lettuce leaf in a frying pan.

  “If you’re not done yet,” he said, “we can come back. No problem. I was just thinkin’ that—”

  “Yeah, yeah... I’ve heard it all before.” Eileen looked over at Savannah, a faint twinkle in her eyes. “How do you put up with this guy?”

  “Eh, he’s not so bad. He buys me a Hershey bar every Valentine’s Day and takes me out to Mickey D’s on my birthday.”

  “What a catch. You’d better hang on to him.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dirk interjected. “Is my stuff done or not?”

  “It’s done, but I don’t think you’re going to like what you’ve got.” Eileen led them to the back of the room where several long tables were set up with beakers, microscopes, and assorted laboratory equipment that always reminded Savannah of her high school biology class.

  “What have I got?” he asked, following her like an obedient puppy. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong in any of those samples I brought you.”

  “Are you kidding?” Eileen gave him a dirty look. ‘You brought me everything but the kitchen sink. I had to find something in those samples or you probably would have dragged that in next.”

  He brightened. “Then you did find something! ” Eileen strolled over to a pile of files that were lying on one of the tables and picked up the top one, a bright yellow folder. She flipped it open, taking her good old easy time.

  Savannah suppressed a chuckle. Few people could get under Dirk’s skin as efficiently as Eileen. And he didn’t dare retaliate, because his lab results would take twice as long the next time.

  “The cake contained high levels of phenyprophedrine,” she said.

  Dirk practically jumped out of his jeans. “I knew it! And I’ll bet that it was in some of that stuff I brought in here, too—the sugar or the flour, or—”

  “The cocoa.” Eileen glanced down at the open folder in her hands. ‘The cocoa was absolutely full of it.”

  “I ate a bite of it,” Savannah said, “and so did several others there that night. And obviously, we’re all still kicking around. It must have not been a lethal dose.”

  “Not if a person only had a few bites of the cake, and if that person were healthy,” Eileen said. ‘The most they would feel would probably be a dry mouth, an elevated pulse, maybe some anxiety or trembling.”

  “But if somebody had a bad heart and was on phenylprophedrine?” Dirk asked. “Could it cause a heart attack?”

  “Sure. It could significandy raise the pulse rate and the blood pressure, which would put a strain on an already diseased heart. The combination could be fatal.”

  “But who would know something like that?” Dirk asked. “You’d have to be a doctor, or somebody in the medical profession, right?”

  “Not necessarily.” Eileen replaced the folder on the stack. “When phenylprophedrine was recalled, there were news stories on TV and in the papers that warned people with heart conditions, especially people taking metosorbide, that it could be dangerous, even deadly.”

  “So,” Savannah said. “We can narrow it down to a doctor, a nurse, or somebody who watches TV or reads the Times. That helps a lot.”

  Dirk shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and rattled his change—his “frustrated” gesture. “I don’t suppose there were any prints on that cocoa box.”

  Eileen gave him one of her irritating smirks. “Now wouldn’t that make it easy for you.” She walked over to another table and another stack of files. This time she picked up a red folder. Opening it, she shoved it under his nose.

  He looked it over before handing it back.

  Savannah said, “Well?”

  “The victim’s,” he replied.

  “That’s all?”

  “Yep.” He gave Eileen a “thanks for nothing” look. “After all, we wouldn’t want to make it too easy, right?”

  Half an hour later Savannah was dropping Dirk off in the police station parking lot.

  “Sorry, buddy,” she said. “But now we know for sure it’s a homicide. All we’ve gotta do is find out who spiked the cocoa.”

  He replied with an inarticulate grumble.

  “Cheer up,” she added as he walked away. “It’s barbecued pork chops and corn on the cob night at my house. Ryan and John will be there. Bring those papers of Streck’s along, and we’ll go over them again with you.” He just kept walking, head down, radiating gloom. “Hey,” she shouted after him, “at least you don’t have to entertain my sister. You don’t have a cold. You don’t have to shave your legs or color your gray. You think you’ve got it rough? Boy, you don’t know what rough is.”

  Chapter

  13

  “There’s nothing on earth like a big, juicy pork chop JL to cheer that guy up,” Savannah told Tammy as she threw a couple more pieces of meat on her backyard grill.

  Tammy glanced over at Dirk, who was sprawled on a chaise lounge, a drowsy smile on his face, a beer in one hand, his empty plate in the other. He was past “satisfied” and was coming ‘round the bend toward “sated.” Another chop should do the trick.

  With a pair of tongs, Savannah removed a few more ears of foil-wrapped corn from the coals and placed them on the platter that Tammy was holding. “Make sure John gets another one of those,” she said. “Don’t let Dirk have them all.”

  As Tammy walked away with the corn, Ryan left the picnic table where he had been sitting with John and walked over to the grill. He gave her a smile that gave her shivers, in spite of the warm evening and the proximity of the grill.

  “You’ve outdone yourself, Savannah,” he told her. “As usual, dinner was fantastic. One of these nights soon, you’ll have to let us take you out to Chez Antoine. He makes an amazing chateaubriand, and his chocolate crème brûlée is orgasmic.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be free for a while.” Savannah gave a little nod in Cordele’s direction. She was sitting by herself in a chair under the arbor, staring into space, a bottle of Tammy’s mineral water in her hand.

  “Ah, that’s all right. The more Reid girls, the merrier.”

  “Not necessarily,” she muttered, brushing some sauce on the chops and stifling a sneeze and a sniffle.

  Ryan studied Cordele thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Your sister does seem a bit depressed this evening,” he whispered. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. For her, ‘depressed’ is more of a lifestyle than a mood.”


  “That’s too bad. But still, John and I would love to take the two of you out for dinner. Heaven knows, we owe you some hospitality after all the great meals you’ve prepared for us recently.”

  “Are you kidding? You don’t owe me diddly-squat. Dirk is out of his funk—that’s worth a fortune right there.”

  Ryan shrugged. “I don’t know how much we had to do with that.”

  “More than you think. Just knowing that he’s going to get some help with this case perked him right up. Of course, he’d never admit that’s the reason he’s cheerful.”

  “He doesn’t usually even admit to being cheerful.”

  “How true.”

  “So, when are we going to review what you’ve got on the case?”

  “Right after the peach and blackberry cobbler.”

  “What? No chocolate cake?”

  She made a face. “Please, I may never eat chocolate cake again. The phone’s been ringing off the hook with reporters wanting to get a statement from me. Apparently, it was leaked that Eleanor, Queen of Chocolate, didn’t die of natural causes, and they all want to talk to her so-called bodyguard who blew it.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, between losing a client and nursing a cold, I’ve had better weeks. But then, compared to Eleanor Maxwell’s week....”

  Dirk sauntered over to the grill, his empty plate in his hand and an expectant look on his face.

  “Okay, okay, here you go.” She plopped a couple more chops on his plate. “Don’t ever say that we don’t feed you around here.”

  “When I dish the dirt about you, Van, I never mention that.”

  She raised one eyebrow and shook her tongs at him. “Never say ‘dirt’ to somebody who prepares your food.” He gave his chops a suspicious look but walked back to his chaise and dug in anyway.