Corpse Suzette

by G. A. McKevett

  She stared at the window, at the winter moonlight shining through the lace curtains and painting silver patterns on her bedspread, her arms, her hands, and the cats.

  Intuition, or the musings of an exhausted, perimenopausal woman?

  She decided to wait until the morning light to make the call.

  Chapter

  13

  Tammy sat at Savannah’s rolltop desk, Sergio’s computer in front of her, a scowl on her face. Savannah stood over her shoulder, staring at the screen, looking just as irritated.

  She didn’t know exactly why she was irritated. But Tammy was out of sorts, and when Lady Sunshine and Light was in a funk, things had to be bad.

  “No luck so far, huh?” she asked her.

  “Not really. Sergio was a pretty boring and predictable guy, judging from his files here,” Tammy replied. “Lots of porn—as I suspected there would be. He had... uh... exotic tastes. A lot of matchmaking services of the sleazier variety.”

  “Searching for his soul mate?”

  “More like trying to connect with somebody—or bodies— with equally exotic tastes in the bedroom.”

  Tammy clicked a couple of times and a picture popped up on the screen. Savannah stared at it a few seconds, turning her head to the right, then the left several times, before she could finally decipher what the threesome were doing to each other and themselves. She thought that after working a stint in vice in West Hollywood, she’d seen it all.

  She hadn’t.

  “Well, isn’t that lovely,” she said. “People are just so... resourceful... when it comes to that sort of nonsense. What else was ol’ Sergio into?”

  “Sports cars, luxury boats, home movie theaters—the usual big-ticket boy toys,” Tammy replied. “Quite a bit of stock market research, although he obviously didn’t know what he was doing. And... wait a minute...”

  “What? What is it?”

  “A whole folder here full of info off the net about how to create a new identity.”

  Both women went from grouchy to excited in two seconds. Across the room, Abigail sat on the sofa, watching the news on television. Both cats were in her lap, begging for petting with a degree of enthusiasm that they usually reserved for Savannah alone.

  “Did you hear this?” she said, pointing to the TV. “Now they’re saying that the government grossly overestimated the effects of extra weight on a person’s overall health.”

  “What sort of things are in that folder?” Savannah asked, pulling up a chair so that she could sit next to Tammy.

  “How to get a fake birth certificate, for one thing,” Tammy told her. “It’s shockingly easy in some states. All you have to do is supply the basic information by phone and order it, and you get it in the mail in a couple of weeks.”

  “They’re even saying here on TV that it’s actually better for you to be moderately overweight than to be as thin as those stupid charts say you’re supposed to be!” Abigail laughed—a chuckle that sounded like it was right out of an old Vincent Price horror film. “Wait ’til I tell some of those bony-assed friends of mine about that!”

  “And there’s info here,” Tammy continued, “about how to set up anonymous bank accounts.”

  “Anonymous accounts? Like in Switzerland, where you don’t even have to give them a name when you open the account?” Tammy nodded and laughed out loud. “Aha! That’s why I couldn’t find his account! I was looking at all the mainstream banks’ websites. I swear, I’d tried to log into them all with that stupid number and password. Dead ends everywhere.”

  She reached for a sheet of paper in a stack on the desk and showed it to Savannah. It had at least fifty bank names and their Web sites listed. Every one of them had been scratched off.

  “Hey, get a load of that!” Abigail interjected. “This reporter says that the research behind those previous claims was funded by companies selling weight-loss products. Figures. I hate those people. They suck.”

  “I didn’t even think about the anonymous banks.” Tammy crumpled the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket under the desk.

  “But that makes perfect sense,” Savannah said. “If he was going to stash ill-gotten gains, especially in that big a sum, it wouldn’t be at a run-of-the-mill, local bank. They report deposits of over ten thousand dollars to the 1RS.”

  “If they want to do some helpful research,” Abigail continued from the sofa, “how about some studies on how many people have ruined their health by buying all those stupid products and starving themselves?”

  “But I can’t imagine Sergio travelling to Switzerland with that kind of cash,” Savannah mused. “With airline security as tight as it is today, they’d have a lot of questions if your suitcases were stuffed with that kind of money.”

  “He wouldn’t have to go all the way to Switzerland,” Tammy said. “I know there are banks like that in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean.”

  “Did you know,” Abigail persisted, in spite of having no audience, “that the average dieting woman in America consumes fewer calories a day than one who’s literally starving to death in a famine-plagued, third-world country?”

  “But even the Cayman Islands would present the same problem,” Savannah told her. “You’d have to go through customs, and you can’t stuff a mil and a half in your shorts.”

  “Let me go online here,” Tammy said. “And I’ll see if I can find any other banks with anonymous accounts. Maybe there’s one closer to home.”

  “And all this crap about eating right and exercising to keep the weight off.” Abby shook her head. “Do you know that a person has to walk thirty-five miles to work off one pound of fat! Thirty-five miles! One pound! And yet our society just assumes that if you’re heavy, you’re lazy. The big people I know work a lot harder at exercising than the skinny ones I know. You have to exercise if you’re heavy, if for no other reason, just to keep your self-righteous, buttinsky friends off your back.”

  “You get on that anonymous bank angle, Tam,” Savannah said. “That sounds promising.”

  “And,” Abigail continued, “I hate how they just assume that if you’re thin, you’re physically fit. I can’t even tell you how many women keep their weight down by smoking, purging, or taking uppers. And the minute they quit, here come the pounds, stacking on, so they go back to smoking, taking laxatives, and barfing. Tell me how healthy that is! And yet, they’re the first ones in line to tell their bigger friends how they need to lose weight for health reasons. It’s not a matter of vanity, on no, it’s for health! Health, my ass. It’s a way for them to make other people feel inferior, that’s all.”

  Savannah could see Tammy sinking lower and lower in her chair, and she wondered how she must be feeling. Abigail’s words must sting a bit, since Tammy was apparently a slender “them” on her cousin’s list of offenders.

  Savannah turned to Abby and with the softest tone she could muster, she said, “I hear you, Abby. And I even agree with a lot of what you’re saying. But there just have to be a few slender people in this world who actually stay that way by eating right and being active, who don’t smoke, purge, or take drugs.”

  Abigail scowled. “Well, maybe a few, but...”

  “And some of them may actually mean well when they express concern for their loved ones’ health. They might be worried about diabetes—”

  “My blood sugar is perfectly normal.”

  “And high cholesterol—”

  “180.”

  “Heart disease—”

  “Had a stress test two months ago. Just fine.”

  “Blood pressure and—”

  “Low, unless I’m getting pissed off, arguing with somebody about my health and my weight, which is my business!”

  Savannah took a long deep breath, then said, “You’re absolutely right, Abby. All of that is your own business, and it sounds to me like you’re healthy as a hor—I mean, as healthy as anyone could hope to be. God bless you, darlin’.” She turned to Tammy. “You ladies excuse me for a minut
e. I’m going to call Dirk and see if he’s heard anything from—”

  The phone in the kitchen rang.

  “That’s probably him now,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have some word from Dr. Liu’s office.”

  She looked at the caller identification and picked up the phone. “Hi, turkey butt,” she said. “What’s the word?”

  “Turkey butt?” Dirk sounded only slightly offended. She had called him worse. Much worse. “Do you answer the phone that way when Ryan and John call you?”

  “Of course not. Ryan and John bring me lavender roses. They take me to the finest French restaurants. They tango with me and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I’ve been on stakeouts with you when you had the stomach flu, and I didn’t even complain. Now that’s true romance.”

  Savannah smiled. “It is. It is. You’re quite the Romeo.”

  “You wanna hear what I’ve got or not?”

  “Absolutely. Go.”

  “Liu says it was that stuff. That super bot-whatever medicine that the receptionist told you about. It showed up in D’Alessandro’s tox screen.”

  “Enough to kill him?”

  “Oh yeah, a couple of times over.”

  “Wow. Okay, that narrows our list of suspects a bit,” she said. “It wasn’t someone who just walked in off the streets. Somebody had to have a key to their medicine cabinet.”

  “Yeah, I was gonna go over there to Emerge this afternoon and ask around about that. But right now I’m on my way to Santa Barbara to talk to Du Bois’s sister. They’re estranged, but I wanna shake the family tree and see if anything like rotten apples fall out.”

  “Okay, Tammy and I are working here at home on Sergio’s computer. And she’s trying to get a hit on that bank account number and password.”

  She heard a click on the line and glanced at the ID screen. “Hey, somebody’s calling here from Emerge,” she told him. “Let me see what they want, and I’ll get back to you.”

  She punched the “Flash” button. “Hello?”

  “Hi, is this Savannah?”

  She recognized the husky, tobacco-and-bourbon-roughened voice on the other end instantly.

  “Yes. Hi, Myrna. What’s up?”

  “Is Abigail there with you?”

  Savannah glanced into the living room, where Abby was still lecturing away to the cats and herself as Tammy continued to work at the desk. “Yes, she is. Did you want to speak to her?”

  “That isn’t necessary. If you would just give her a message. Tell her we feel bad about what’s happened with her. How she traveled all the way here from the East coast and isn’t getting her complete Emerge experience. So, we want to give her a makeover anyway, at least as much as we can without a surgeon. Hair, makeup, wardrobe, all of that.”

  “That’s very sweet of you. I’m sure she’ll enjoy that.” Maybe she'll enjoy it, Savannah added mentally. Or she might just spit in your face. You just never know with Miss Abby.

  “Great!” Myrna said. “If you could bring her over right away, we can get started.”

  Sure. I didn't have anything else to do today, Savannah thought. Just cart Abby around and listen to her ranting and...

  Then she remembered the medicine cabinet and the fact that Sergio had died as a result of injected Bot-Avanti.

  “You betcha,” she said. “I’ll get her over there right away.”

  As soon as she had said good-bye to Myrna, Savannah went back to Dirk, who was, surprisingly, still on the line. “You just take care of interviewing the Du Bois family members,” she told him. “I’ll check out Emerge for you.”

  “Wow, thanks, Van. I appreciate it. Especially since you aren’t even getting paid anymore, now that your client’s gone toes-up. Making a special trip and all just for me. That’s so sweet.”

  “Hey, what are friends for? You can make it up to me someday soon.”

  There was a long silence on the other end, then a dubious, “Oh, yeah? How?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The oil in my Mustang needs changing, the seal on my downstairs toilet is leaking, a couple of tiles on my roof are loose.”

  “Hurrumph.”

  He hung up. Dirk was never one for long, sentimental farewells. Especially after home and auto repairs had been mentioned.

  Smiling, she replaced the phone and walked into the living room. “Get out of those pajamas,” she told Abigail. “And put your ridin’ britches on, girl.”

  Abigail looked skeptical. “Why?”

  “Cause you’re on your way to Emerge. You’re gonna go get all prettied up. A whole day of be-e-e-auty.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, I’ll take it!” Tammy piped up. “I’d love a day of beauty at a spa! Besides, it would be worth it just to hang out with that hotty Jeremy.”

  “I’ll go. I’ll go.” Abigail didn’t exactly shoot off the sofa, but the cats had to scramble to keep from hitting the floor when she dumped them off her lap.

  As she headed up the stairs, Savannah walked over and slapped Tammy on the back. “I didn’t know you had a thing for Jeremy Lawrence.”

  “I don’t. But she does, and that’s all that matters.”

  “Deception. I didn’t know you had it in you, Tam.”

  She chuckled. “I didn’t, but I’ve been hanging out with you. It’s contagious and you’re a carrier.”

  “That’s true. If liars’ pants really did catch on fire, I’d be buying new drawers five times a week.”

  Chapter

  14

  The ride to Emerge with Abigail was a bit more pleasant than usual for Savannah. Abigail had brightened considerably at the prospect of spending time with Jeremy Lawrence. She was somewhat less morose, and considering it was Abigail, “less morose” qualified as “darned near giddy” in Savannah’s book.

  And the moment they arrived and entered the building, a swarm of friendly Emerge employees, including Jeremy Lawrence, descended on Abigail and rushed her away into the luxurious and mysterious recesses of the spa.

  In less than two minutes, they disappeared and Savannah found herself alone in the lobby with only Myrna for company.

  And Myrna wasn’t all that sociable. In fact, she was downright standoffish.

  She returned to her desk and busied herself there, shuffling papers, sticking them into a folder, and ignoring Savannah entirely.

  Savannah followed her and sat, unbidden, on one of the chairs next to her desk. “That was so sweet of you guys, arranging this whole day of beauty for Abigail. I think it’ll do her a world of good.”

  Myrna didn’t reply, just continued to mess with her papers, a look of anger mixed with hurt on her face.

  Savannah wondered what might have happened to change the climate so quickly. When they had spoken on the phone less than an hour ago, Myrna had been her usual warm and friendly self. Now things had gone from warm to frosty and Savannah had to find out why.

  “Is everything okay, Myrna?” she asked. “Have I upset or offended you in some way?”

  “You mean, by lying to me, telling me you’re a reporter when you’re really a private investigator?”

  Oh, that. Savannah cursed herself for not telling Myrna herself. It was always worse if they heard it from someone else.

  “I’m sorry, Myrna. Sometimes in my line of work, I’m not always honest with people. It’s a part of the job that I’m uncomfortable with. Especially when I’m dealing with someone I like, I’d rather be forthcoming.”

  Myrna stared down at a folder on her desk. “You could have told me. If you could tell somebody like Devon, you could have told me. I thought you and I were girlfriends.”

  “I didn’t confide in Devon as a buddy,” Savannah said. “I had to tell her because I was with Sergeant Coulter when he went out to inform her of Sergio’s death. And I’d still like to be friends with you, if you can forgive me for that deception.”

  Myrna looked up at her, the anger in her eyes softening. “Is there anything else yo
u need to tell me? Anything else you might have lied... or been deceptive about?”

  “No. That’s it. Really.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Then let’s start over.”

  “Done!” Savannah glanced down at Myrna’s desk, at the one and only folder there. It had Abigail’s name on it. “Not a lot going on, I guess,” she said.

  “Next to nothing. We’re going to close the doors for good tomorrow. With Suzette gone and Sergio dead, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go through the motions anymore. That’s why we figured we’d go all out for Abigail today. Might as well start and finish Emerge with panache.”

  “And how about Mystic Twilight? What’s going to happen to that spa?”

  “Same thing. It was about to fold anyway. Closing will just be a formality at this point. It’s all very sad.”

  “Do you have any leads on another job?”

  “No,” Myrna said sadly. “Everybody wants nineteen-year-olds at the front desk at these clinics. Maybe I’ll retire. Move to Florida and spend my time lying in the sun.”

  “There are worse ways to spend the rest of your life, that’s for sure.”

  Myrna reached beneath her desk and took out a small box. “I just need to pack up a few things here,” she said, “and then I’m off to... well... the rest of my life, as you say.”

  She opened a drawer and began to load personal items into the box: nail polish, makeup, sugarless gum and mints, some costume jewelry, and a few pictures.

  Savannah reached for one of the snapshots. “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  It was a picture of a white poodle, holding a small black teddy bear in his teeth. The teddy bear was wearing a bright red and green plaid vest and looked a bit ragged around the edges. Savannah could swear that the dog was grinning.

  “That’s Sammy,” Myrna said, “and Baby.”

  “Baby?”