A Body To Die For

by G. A. McKevett

“Ah! You really do practice what you preach,” Savannah said, far too brightly. “Look at you, workin’ up a sweat like that!”

  “What the hell are you doing in my garage?” Clarissa asked, ice in her eyes and her voice.

  “Um…looking for you?”

  Hell, it’s worth a try, Savannah thought.

  “Under my car? You thought I was under my car?”

  Okay, Plan B. When all else fails, disarm them with total honesty.

  “I came by to talk to you, but when I realized you were gone, I figured I’d snoop around and see if I could find some sort of evidence.”

  “Evidence against me?”

  Savannah shrugged. “Evidence is evidence. It points where it will. I follow.”

  “Am I going to have to get a restraining order against you?”

  “Maybe you could; maybe you couldn’t. But I might be just the person to find out who killed your husband. You do want to know, don’t you? You were the one who was rantin’ and ravin’ about it being more than forty-eight hours, and how worried you were that we weren’t going to solve this case, yada, yada.”

  Clarissa stood, staring at Savannah for the longest time, her arms crossed over her chest. Finally, she turned and headed out of the garage.

  At the door, she paused and said over her shoulder, “Well, come on. Unless you want to question me in a garage. Maybe you’d like to climb under my car, check for transmission leaks, while you interrogate me?”

  Savannah joined her at the door and together they headed around the wall toward the bell gate.

  “Good one,” Savannah said, grudgingly, but with a smile.

  “Thank you,” Clarissa replied.

  A recently showered, remarkably relaxed Clarissa offered Savannah a glass of merlot as they settled into two of the comfortable wicker chairs under the pavilion in the middle of the courtyard.

  “Not now,” Savannah told her. “Maybe some other time.”

  Clarissa poured herself a generous glass, then leaned back and propped her feet on a cushy ottoman.

  Savannah couldn’t help thinking that Clarissa’s yoga pants and hoodie top would be a lot more comfortable than her own blouse, slacks, and jacket. Especially with a Beretta strapped to her side. She also had to admit that Clarissa had the hard body she promised all of her gym attendees and the folks who ate her diet meals, worked out to her videos, and popped her vitamin supplements.

  “Do you run every day?” Savannah asked her.

  “Every single day. I have to.”

  Savannah thought about the wolf pack. “I’ll bet you do.”

  “You could run yourself, you know. It would do you good.”

  “Punching out people I don’t like would do me good, too. But I don’t give in to the temptation. Discipline comes in all forms.”

  Clarissa took a sip of her wine. “I guess it does at that.”

  “And besides, I do run. I run to the grocery store. I run to the dry cleaners. I run to the mall. I run myself ragged all day long and half the night, too. Sometimes all night.”

  “I mean deliberate exercise.”

  “Occasionally, I help Dirk run down a perp, tackle him to the ground, and cuff him. When we’re hittin’ the pavement, that gets pretty darned deliberate.”

  Clarissa swirled her wine in its goblet. “So, why did you come out here to see me? Do you have any new leads…or whatever you call it?”

  “Yes,” Savannah said. “I found out about Rachel.”

  For a moment, Savannah thought Clarissa was going to spit wine all over the off-white cushions of her furniture.

  “Rachel? Rachel, who?” Her whole casual lady-of-the-manor air evaporated.

  “Oh, come on. Give me a little credit here. If I know her name is Rachel, don’t you think I know everything else?”

  “Who told you about her?” She leaned forward and set her glass down so hard on the coffee table that Savannah was surprised it didn’t shatter. Clarissa’s eyes narrowed. “Was it Ruby? That bitch! It was her, wasn’t it? She always did have it in for me. I hate her.”

  “I’m not free to say. But, really, Clarissa…people do talk. Did you really think you could hide something like a twin sister forever?”

  Clarissa plopped back in her chair, suddenly deflated. She sighed. “Well, I hoped so. It was easier, before my career really took off. In the beginning, when I was first starting out, it seemed like a good idea. But then, all the press, the interviews, the public exposure…and yes…the money. It, well, complicated things.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Savannah said. “I feel really bad for you. I saw one of those complications of yours parked in the garage.”

  “Hey, did you ever pay the insurance or a repair bill on a Benz?”

  “Poor baby. I don’t know how you stand it.” She waved a hand, indicating the yard, which was now bathed in beautiful blue accent lighting. “All this. It must be rough.”

  “My husband was just murdered.”

  “That’s true. I’m sorry.”

  Clarissa gave her a weird, sarcastic little smile. “Are you this insensitive to all your victims’ families?”

  Savannah though it over a moment before answering and decided to be honest. “No, I’m usually pretty nice. I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. Really, I apologize.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s me. I always seem to bring out the worst in people.”

  Savannah was shocked at this admission from a woman whom she had assumed didn’t have a humble bone in her well-toned body. She considered giving her the token argument of, “Oh, no, that isn’t true.” But, again, she decided to go the honesty route.

  “Why do you think that is?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I started it a long time ago, you know…getting in people’s faces, giving them hell, telling them like it is….”

  “The way you think it is.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Back then, people told me I was strong, gutsy, determined. Now they just call me a bitch.”

  “But not to your face.”

  “Of course not. When you’re at the top, nobody says things like that to your face. They just run you down behind your back, and then you hear about it later.”

  “Tell me about Rachel,” Savannah said.

  “She’s my sister. My twin. But you know that already. We didn’t even know each other for the first twenty-five years of our lives. Our mom gave us away.”

  “Why?”

  “She was unmarried, poor. The usual reasons. It doesn’t matter. Why would you care? I’ll bet your mother didn’t give you away.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Savannah said softly. “The court took us, all nine of us, away from her and gave us to our grandmother. She raised us.”

  Clarissa looked shocked…and impressed. “Wow! Did your mother fight for custody?”

  “No. It was sorta a cut-and-dried case.”

  “Oh.”

  “How did you and Rachel finally get together?”

  “I found her. She was working at a pizza place in Greenwich Village. I was in New York City trying to get ‘discovered’ as an actress. One day this guy who was in a play I was doing off-off Broadway told me, ‘I know a girl who looks just like you, only she’s fat.’ I knew I was adopted and had a twin sister, so I went to see myself. And the rest, as they say, is history.” She took a deep breath. “Actually, I was hoping it wouldn’t become history, but now…”

  “So, you looked her up and how did that go? Tearful reunion and all that?”

  “Not really. She wasn’t all that happy to see me, sort of standoffish actually.”

  “Why do you suppose that was?”

  “She was jealous. Think about it. If you were fat and ugly, and a cute, slender, actress came into the place where you were slinging pizzas and said, ‘Hi, I’m your identical twin sister,’ wouldn’t that piss you off?”

  “Do you have any idea how obnoxious you sound when you say something like that?”

  Clarissa looked genuinel
y confused as she thought it over. “I guess not. Pretty bad?”

  “Odious.” Savannah shook her head. “The reunion with Rachel didn’t go so well. Then what?”

  “I gave up the stage and came to California, Hollywood television, movies, palm trees and all that.”

  “When did you come up with the idea for her to pose for your before-the-weight-loss shot?”

  “Three years ago. It was my agent’s idea.”

  “Your agent told you to lie and defraud the public?”

  “Sheez, that sounds bad when you put it like that. No, of course he didn’t. But when I told him I had this great diet exercise plan that I’d lost a ton of weight from, he said, ‘Give me a picture of yourself before you lost the weight,’ and I didn’t have one, because, of course, I’ve always been thin.”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh…was that odious, too?”

  “Just moderately stinky. It’s more the sanctimonious tone that’s the piss-off.” Savannah grinned. “Please continue. You were about to tell me how Rachel blackmailed you and threatened to tell everybody about the picture when…”

  “Oh, my God! You know about that, too?”

  “You’re good at what you do; so am I.”

  “Apparently so.” Clarissa reached back, pulled the barrette out of her hair, and ran her fingers through her blond mass. “Yes, she did. But not right away. I had told her I’d take care of her, send her money every now and then. But that wasn’t enough. She started demanding these big, lump payments.”

  “Did you pay her off?”

  “Not at first. I got mad and told her to take what I gave her or go to hell. And no sooner had I said that, than I started getting these threatening anonymous letters, postmarked Manhattan. Like I’m not going to figure that out. Duh.”

  Savannah chuckled. “Rachel isn’t as savvy as you, huh?”

  “Oh, please. She’s ugly and a moron.”

  “Oo-okay. And how did you handle the so-called anonymous letters?”

  “I sent Bill to New York to take care of it. That was a big mistake.”

  Savannah thought of what Ruby had said about the affair between Bill and Rachel. Yes, she’d agree that may have been a tactical error.

  In view of her recent promise to be more sensitive, she considered how to ask the next question. “How was Bill’s…um…relationship with Rachel?”

  Clarissa bristled. “They had no relationship! There was no relationship. He wouldn’t give a tub-o like her a second look. He had me! What would he want with someone like her?”

  When Savannah didn’t reply, Clarissa tossed her head and gave her a dismissive wave. “And I don’t care if that sounds bitchy. It’s true. It’s just true!”

  “I’m not arguing with you, Clarissa. She’s your sister. Bill was your husband. You’d be a better judge of all that business than I would.”

  “You bet I would. And it didn’t happen, I tell you. Did not happen!”

  “Okay. Let me ask you this…. How do you know for sure that the threatening letters, the anonymous ones from Manhattan, were from Rachel? You had to know other people in New York.”

  “The letters demanded money. We paid the money. Bill dropped it off, over and over again. What else could we do? It would have ruined everything. We would have lost it all. We had to pay, and she knew it.”

  “But how do you know for sure that it was Rachel who was blackmailing you?”

  “Because we saw her son one night, at the drop-off spot, taking the bag of money out of the garbage can. She sent a kid, a fourteen-year-old little boy to pick up her stinking blackmail money. How low is that?”

  “Low.” Savannah nodded. “I have to agree with you. That’s lousy.”

  “Have you met Rachel yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you won’t like her. If you think I’m a bitch, wait till you meet her. You are going to hunt her down and interrogate her, too, right?”

  “Yeah,” Savannah said with a sigh. “Woo-hoo. Ain’t it fun, being me?”

  When Savannah dragged her weary bones through her door, it was nearly eight o’clock and she was literally seeing double. On the way home from Rancho Rodriguez, she had stopped for a green light, gone the wrong direction on the 101, a freeway she had traveled several times a day, every day, for the past twenty years. And she had nearly hit her own oleander bushes, pulling into her driveway.

  “I can’t do it,” she was telling Dirk on the cell phone. “I was thinking of driving out to Rachel’s tonight and trying to talk to her. But I can’t. I’m a threat to man and beast on the road right now. If I don’t get some sleep, I’m gonna fall down dead in my tracks.”

  “Go to bed. I know I’m gonna as soon as I get home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The station, filling out fives.”

  Her heart went out to him. If there was anything worse than being on the job for all these hours, it was having to do paperwork when your eyes were crossing. “You poor baby. When do you think you’ll get to bed?”

  “God only knows.”

  Savannah put her gun and purse away in the foyer closet and walked into the living room. Tammy was still sitting at the computer, totally absorbed in her photo task.

  Marietta was watching some trashy movie on the television. Looking at the screen, Savannah saw more naked flesh writhing on bedsheets than she had seen in ages. She had the sinking feeling this was a pay-per-view that would show up on her bill. You didn’t get hardcore porn for free.

  Marietta was never cheap to have around.

  “How did your visit with Pinky go?” she asked Dirk on the phone as she walked past Tammy and patted her on the back, then continued on into the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot chocolate.

  “Waste of time. He wouldn’t admit anything freely, and I was too tired to beat anything out of him. I’ve gotta admit it, Van, I’m not as intimidating as I was in my twenties.”

  Savannah chuckled. “Yeah, and I don’t look as good in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings as I did, either. You reckon life’s still worth livin’?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Tammy’s still working on that picture for you,” she told him. “And knowing her, she’ll stay at it till the wee morning hours. So, you won’t be the only one slaving away.”

  “Good, misery loves company and I’m really suffering here.”

  Savannah took a mug out of the cupboard and poured some chocolate milk into it. No fancy stuff tonight. Just a simple cup of cocoa…with whipped cream…some chocolate shavings on top…maybe a sprinkle of cinnamon…

  Then she heard something on the phone. Something suspicious.

  It sounded a heck of a lot like a bottle top being removed. She even heard the clatter of a bottle opener being tossed into a silverware drawer.

  “What was that?” she asked, straining to hear.

  “What was what?” replied Mr. I’m Working My Fingers to the Bone.

  “I just heard you open a beer.”

  “Did not.”

  “I did, too. Since when do you drink at work?”

  “I’m not!”

  “You are! And what’s that?” She could hear something else…an all-too-familiar theme song playing in the background. “That’s Bonanza! I hear Bonanza! You’re at home, kicking back in your friggen trailer, swiggin’ beer and watching those DVDs I bought you for your birthday!”

  “I…I…well…”

  “You lyin’ sack! You peckerhead! And to think I was mopin’ around here, feeling all guilty and sorry for you! I hope you choke on that beer. I hope Pa Cartwright gets shot and actually croaks!”

  Chapter 15

  Savannah hung up on Dirk and tossed her cell phone onto the counter.

  To appease her anger, she squirted an extra shot of whipped cream on top of the cocoa she’d been making, and walked back into the living room.

  “Was that Dirk-o you were yelling at in there?” Tammy asked without looking away from the screen
.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “He’s being his usual, contrary, aggravating self, that’s what.” She rested one hand on Tammy’s shoulder. “How’s it going there?”

  “Okay. I’ve sharpened the focus, increased the contrast, toyed with all sorts of special effects to try to…”

  Savannah started to glaze over. “Why don’t you call it a night and go on home, sugar? You’ve done way more than enough for one day.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to work a little longer before I leave. I feel like I’m close, and I hate to quit.”

  “You stay if you want, but I’m taking a nice, warm bubble bath, drinking this hot chocolate, and then hitting the sheets. You can lock up when you leave, right?”

  “No problem.”

  Savannah kissed her on the top of her head, then walked over to Marietta, who was staring goo-goo-eyed at the television screen.

  “What the hell are you watching there?” Savannah asked.

  “I think it’s called The Long, Hot Summer,” Marietta replied, leaning sideways to see around Savannah, who had partially blocked her view.

  “Get outta here. That ain’t Paul Newman there—and that sure as shootin’ ain’t Joanne Woodward that he’s…ew-w-w…

  “It’s a different version. A remake.”

  “It’s porn. How can you watch that crap?”

  “They’re making love. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yeah, well, when it comes to that sort of thing, I’d rather be a participant than a spectator.”

  Marietta gave her an unpleasant little snicker. “Participated a lot lately, have we, sis?”

  She had her there. Savannah could hardly even remember the last time she had been properly…participated.

  “Hey, you made hot chocolate!” Marietta said, when she noticed the mug brimming with whipped cream in Savannah’s hand. “Where’s mine?”

  Reluctantly, Savannah handed it to her. “Right here. I figured you’d want some.”

  Watching her cocoa disappear and Marietta acquire a frothy mustache was nearly more than she could bear. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’m sorry I had to run out like that when you first got here, Mari. Maybe tomorrow we can go to the beach or get some fish and chips on the pier, or—”