And she was smelling it now.
The stench of death.
“You go in,” she said, holding her sweater over the lower half of her face. “You know I can’t take it. I’ll hurl. I always do, and that makes things so much worse.”
“Pansy.”
She raised her hands in the air. “I admit it. I have no pride in this respect. None at all. I’m a total wuss.”
“Sissy girl.”
“I am. That’s me. Prissy Pants, that’s me. You go in and I’ll owe you.”
He shook his head, stood at the door of the pool house, and opened it. Then he took a deep, deep breath... and shuddered from head to toe.
Dr. Liu had told her long ago, “Here’s how you handle the smell, Savannah: just take a big deep gulp of it, fill up your head and your lungs. It’s such a shock to the system, you won’t smell anything else for hours.”
Yeah, right, she thought. Maybe it works for Dr. Liu and Dirk, but I’d rather bite a skunk in the ass and suffer the consequences.
“What is it? Do you see the box?” she asked.
He was frozen in the doorway, staring, his mouth hanging open.
“Well?” she asked, inching forward, her curiosity getting the best of her. “What do you see?”
“Oh, my god,” he said. “Weird. This is so creepy! Van, come here! You gotta see this.”
She might be squeamish about smelling dead bodies, but Savannah’s primary character attribute was nosiness. It overrode absolutely everything else in her system.
She held one hand over her mouth and with the other hand pinched her nose together. Then she ran over to the door and looked inside.
The interior was dim, lit only by one small window. But the late morning sunlight was shining in enough to illuminate the macabre scene.
A woman sat on a folding chair, pulled up to a card table. Across the tabletop was spread a game of solitaire. She held a stack of cards in her hands.
“What the hell?” Savannah said, forgetting all about the stench.
The woman was dead.
No doubt about it.
She was tied to the chair with yellow nylon rope and was sagging limply against her bindings. Her flat, milky eyeballs stared sightlessly at the opposite wall.
She was wearing a white physician’s smock and her platinum blonde hair was nicely coifed on one side, and stuck to the other side of her head with a mass of black, matted gore that Savannah knew was the result of a terrible head wound.
On her smock pocket was a small, black, plastic name tag.
Savannah read it aloud. “Suzette Du Bois, M.D.”
She and Dirk stared at each other for a long time. Finally, he said, “So, if this is Suzette... who do I have handcuffed in there?”
They ran back to the house and rushed into the master bedroom, where the maid was offering the lady on the bed a glass of water with a drinking straw. The woman pushed the water away, spilling it across the bed.
At her feet, Sammy the poodle whined and licked the water off his paw.
“Who are you?” Dirk shouted, jostling her shoulder. “Devon? Clare Du Bois?”
“No, go away,” the woman mumbled with swollen, bandaged lips. “Get out!”
Savannah looked down at the woman’s hands. She was clutching the bedspread, digging her nails into the fabric. Her long, bright red fingernails.
Savannah had seen those fingernails before... swirling a drink.
“Myrna,” she said. “Myrna, it’s you.”
The woman on the bed began to sob; it was a horrible, high-pitched shriek, like a hurt animal caught in a trap.
The maid backed into the corner of the room, pulled her apron up over her head, and began to softly cry.
Dirk looked at Savannah in surprise. “How do you...? Is it her?”
Savannah nodded. “It’s Myrna,” she said. “The body in the pool house is Suzette. She killed her.”
“But why?” Dirk said. “For the money?”
Savannah thought back on the grisly scene that had been staged in the pool house. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You wanted her to be alone, too, didn’t you, Myrna?”
The woman stopped shrieking and nodded her head ever so slightly.
“Suzette fixed your ex-boyfriend up really good, didn’t she,” Savannah said. “So good that he left you, found himself a younger woman with his new, younger-looking face that you paid for.”
Again, Myrna nodded.
Savannah continued. “She’s playing solitaire out there in your pool house. And you’re here, in a fancy house, with all her money and Sergio’s, too. And under those bandages you’ve got a new face, a new life... or so you thought.”
Myrna nodded, still crying, still clutching the bedclothes. “There’s just one problem, Myrna,” Savannah told her, “you can’t create a nice, new life for yourself by robbing two other people of theirs.”
“Yeah,” Dirk said, uncuffing the bedpost and placing it on her other wrist. “Lady, you just bought yourself one shitload of really nasty karma.”
Chapter
24
“I’m never going to look at that island the same way again,” Savannah said as she gazed out across the water at Santa Tesla Island, where it appeared to be floating on the horizon atop a cloud of haze.
“I just wish we’d been there with you,” Abby said as she bit into one of Savannah’s chicken salad sandwiches and helped herself to a handful of potato chips. “I would have given anything to sleep in a hotel right under that lighthouse. To have its beam shining right inside your room! That must have been a wonderful experience.”
Savannah cast a quick warning glance toward Dirk, but he pretended not to hear as he stretched out on his back on the beach towel and adjusted the bill of his baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun.
“It was okay,” she said. “Maybe we can take you over there for a day trip before you go back home to New York.”
“Count me out on that one,” Dirk grumbled. “I’ve had all of that stinking island I can stand. You couldn’t pay me to go back there again.”
Savannah laughed. “He’s just irked because nobody over there was all that impressed with his gold shield.”
“I shoulda showed ’em my big gun,” he said with a smirk. “That would have put the fear of Dirk in them.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all live in terror of the Almighty Dirko.” Tammy picked up a slice of fresh mango and squirted him with it.
“Myrna Cooper was pretty scared of him,” Savannah said. “She was a babbling idiot on the way home in that medical helicopter. Told Dirk everything he wanted to know and then some.”
“Okay...” Tammy nudged him with her foot. “Why did she dye her hair blond and take the name Norma Jean Baker? She isn’t a big Marilyn fan, is she?”
Dirk groaned and rolled over on his side to face them. He looked terribly put out to have to answer all these questions. But Savannah knew better; Dirk was never happier than when he could complain about something. He was loving every minute of it.
“No, she’s not all that into Marilyn,” he said. “But she figured if we were on her trail, it would be better for us to think she was Suzette. Then, she could supposedly shake us if she needed to and start up again somewhere else, and we’d never know it was her we were chasing. So she wore a blond wig her first few trips to the island. Then the day before we caught up with her, right before her surgery, she colored it permanently.”
“But she’s so much older than Suzette,” Abigail added. “How could she hope to pass for her?”
“She did a pretty good job of it,” Savannah told her. “She wore large sunglasses and scarves and depended on her big cleavage to keep the boys’ eyes off her face. It worked. The guys on the catamaran thought she was a lot younger.”
“How exactly and where did she kill Suzette?” Abby wanted to know.
Savannah cringed, remembering Myrna’s cold-blooded description of the murder. “Suzette used to take Sammy for a walk in som
e woods near her house, first thing, every day when she got home from work. Myrna knew the route well, from taking him for walks herself. She hid herself and her car among the trees and waited for Suzette to come along. Then she ran up behind her, smashed her in the head with a big rock, and dragged her body into her trunk.”
“Primitive,” Abby said.
Savannah nodded. “Very, but effective.”
“So, Myrna was the one who installed the spyware on Sergio’s computer?” Tammy asked.
Savannah shook her head. “Actually, Myrna claims that Suzette put it in there to spy on Sergio’s e-mails and see if he was chasing other women. But Suzette told Myrna about it, and Myrna used the software to get his bank account number and password. That’s how she was able to steal the money out of his account and put it into one of hers.”
“But the password rosarita?” Tammy asked. “Wasn’t that a reference to the place where Suzette caught Sergio with Devon?” Savannah stretched out on the towel beside Dirk and kicked off her shoes. “Myrna overheard the big fight between Devon and Suzette that day after Suzette found them at the Rosarita Hotel,” Savannah said, wriggling her toes into the cool, damp sand. “Again, she made choices based on misleading us into thinking it was Suzette we were after.”
“And...” Abigail said, “...Myrna was the one who put the botulism solution into Sergio’s syringe. But why kill him?”
“Because,” Savannah told her, “she was worried when she heard he had hired me, a private detective, to find his money for him. She figured he might stop at nothing to get it back. If he kept looking, he might have realized it was her that had stolen his money, not Suzette. She decided it would be safer just to have him dead, too.”
“And it was all because she was mad at them for fixing her boyfriend up with a new face and him leaving her for another woman?” Abby shook her head. “If I’d been her, I would have just knocked off the ungrateful, two-timing boyfriend, not them.”
“It wasn’t just that,” Savannah said. “She had worked for Suzette and Sergio for years and resented them the whole time. She was addicted to the surgeries and procedures and was constantly paying off one or the other with her paychecks. She was living below the poverty level because of it, with no way out.”
“But that was her fault, not theirs,” Abby argued.
“Like that has anything to do with whether people commit murder or not,” Dirk said. “These days, people blow other folks away just because they look at them cross-eyed on the freeway.”
“And it wasn’t just revenge,” Savannah continued. “With that kind of money, Myrna figured she’d have a whole new life, all the money she’d ever want for new procedures to keep her looking good, a great house, leisure time to lay out on the beach and attract young studs who don’t mind being supported by a rich older woman. She had it all planned out.”
Abigail shook her head. “She must have been a bit off her rocker, though, saving Suzette’s body, setting it up like that in her pool house. That’s just gross and sick.”
“You think?” Tammy laughed. “You should see what Savannah’s got in her garage.”
“What? What have you got?”
“Nothing,” Savannah told her. “Your cousin is pulling your leg.”
“Really?”
“Probably.”
“You Californians are weird,” Abby said, “I’m going back to New York City where it’s safe.”
“Not just yet.” Savannah gave her a smile and a wink. “Now that we’ve got this case wrapped up, it’s time for you and me to go have ourselves some fun.”
“Just you two?” Tammy asked, pouting just a little.
“Yeap, just us two.”
“Where?” Abby wanted to know. “Where are you taking me?”
“Someplace special. You’ll see.”
“Does it have anything to do with murders or stinky dead bodies playing solitaire alone in pool houses.”
“No,” Dirk said from under his baseball cap. “Savannah only does that fun stuff with me!”
“Yes, because you’re so-o-o special.” Savannah poked him in the ribs.
He grabbed her and held her in a headlock until she nabbed a bit of his midriff and pinched it hard enough to make him howl.
“See what I put up with,” Tammy told Abigail, shaking her head. “We’re just a big dysfunctional family around here. And, would you believe, those two are the parents?”
Abby grinned. “Looks pretty good to me. I think I’ll visit more often.”
Chapter
25
“What is this place?” Abigail asked as Savannah ushered her into the tiny cubbyhole called “The Oasis.”
“Usually, it’s your ordinary, run-of-the-mill bar,” Savannah told her as she guided her toward the corner of the dark little room where a slightly elevated platform was surrounded by a circle of chairs and tables. “But not on Friday night.”
“What happens on Friday night?”
“You’ll see.”
Savannah pulled out a chair, and Abigail sat down on it, facing the platform.
“Actually, I have someplace I have to be in an hour or so,” Abby said, glancing at her watch. “I already arranged for somebody to pick me up here and—”
“Sh-h-h-h...” Savannah said, finger to her lips. “It’s going to start pretty soon. They’re usually quite punctual with the show.”
“What show?”
Savannah just grinned and motioned to the waitress. “Two glasses of your house white here,” she told her. Then, to Abby she said, “The first time I saw this, a few months ago, I was blown away. I think you’ll really like it.”
“What is it?”
“Belly dancing. The real thing, not some cheap, sleazy, Hollywood imitation.”
“Belly dancing?!” Abby’s nostrils flared. “You brought me to a stupid strip club?”
“Not even close. Sit still and watch.”
As if on cue, the room’s lights dimmed, and a soft blue light flooded the platform stage in front of them.
Music began, a slow, sensual drumbeat that slowly increased in tempo. Other exotic sounding instruments joined in, and the crowd began to clap in time to the rhythm.
Abby leaned over to Savannah and said in her ear, “If you think I’m going to sit here and watch some skinny gal with boob implants shake her stuff in my face, you’ve got another—”
Savannah nudged her and motioned to the door. “Look.”
Through the front door of the place came a dancer. Slowly, she made her way through the crowd to the platform, pausing here and there to drape a brightly colored chiffon scarf around someone’s neck, to place a kiss on a forehead, to trail her fingertips along someone’s shoulder or tweak somebody’s hair.
Her movements were light and playful, energetic and bouncy, as she moved onto the stage and continued to sway to the lively beat.
With their seat next to the stage, Savannah and Abby had a full view of the woman. She was middle-aged and full-figured, more than a little overweight according to society’s current standard. But she was exquisite.
Her costume was a cloud of swirling scarves of every color that floated around her when she moved. Tucked here, gathered there, they moved along with her, accenting her every sway and shimmy.
As she moved around the stage, smiling down at individual members of her audience and dropping the scarves among them, she looked like a young girl at play, lighthearted, carefree.
Savannah leaned close to the transfixed Abigail and whispered in her ear, “A real belly dance is the story of a woman’s life,” she said. “This part represents her girlhood. She’s clothed in innocence and happy-go-lucky, the way we all start out.”
As the veils were dropped, more and more of the woman’s body was revealed—her arms, encircled with golden bracelets that jingled when she moved, her legs that, while hardly slender, were muscular and obviously very strong as her skirt parted to reveal and then hide them, her abdomen that rolled and moved with the b
eat of the music that was slowly changing.
The tempo slowed, the volume increased, and the tone became less playful.
The dancer reached down to a nearby table, and someone in the crowd handed her a couple of candles.
Holding one candle in each hand she continued to dance, moving them in circles under her arms, then over her head. Their light illuminated her skin, causing it to glow like living, breathing, fluid gold.
With unbelievable grace, the woman bent backward, her long, dark hair sweeping the floor. Still holding the candles, she sank to her knees on the stage as the other instruments faded away, leaving only the drumbeat as accompaniment.
From her kneeling position, she lowered herself straight backward, until she was lying on her back... all the time still swaying and rolling to the beat.
“What’s she doing now?” Abigail whispered.
“This part represents the travails of womanhood. The difficulties and pain we all encounter that change us from girls into women.”
The dancer placed the candles on her belly and by flexing her muscles, caused them to move in time with the drum. Her arms stretched upward, she seemed to be reaching, striving, grasping for something just beyond her reach, then grabbing it and pulling it toward her.
Lifting the candles from her abdomen, she held them in her hands again and managed to roll across the stage, holding them level all the while, managing, keeping everything in balance.
Slowly she rose to her feet and handed the candles back to the„ crowd.
The drum beat faster and faster, and her movements matched the tempo, shaking, swaying, and shimmying, until her body glistened with the sweat of extreme exertion. Just when it seemed she surely couldn’t continue, the music paused, then switched back to the original playful, happy song.
But this time, as the woman danced off the stage and through the crowd, interacting once again, there was a distinct difference in her movements. She was stronger, more confident, more decisive in her motions.
Corpse Suzette Page 24
