Killer Physique

by G. A. McKevett

  “I guess that’s good news,” Ryan said halfheartedly. “I mean, it’s a terrible thing if he abused steroids and medicines, and it cost him his life. But I’m glad to hear that Dr. Liu doesn’t suspect foul play.”

  Savannah clutched the phone and tried to decide, in that fraction of a moment, whether to be honest with her friend or not.

  She had been close to Ryan for a long time, and they had always been open with each other. And yet he had just lost a dear friend. Was there any advantage in telling him the whole truth? Maybe it would be better to wait a few days and see what she and Dirk could dig up.

  But she took a few too many seconds to make that decision. And Ryan Stone was astute, if nothing.

  “Out with it,” he said. “We want to know everything.”

  “Okay, here goes.” Savannah took a deep breath. “Dirk and I, we aren’t ready to rule out foul play just yet. And Dr. Liu said that, even though she couldn’t find any evidence of homicide, she isn’t completely comfortable with her ruling. And that, my friend, has to stay strictly between the four of us. Understand?”

  Again there was a long, heavy silence. Then he said, “I don’t like it. If that isn’t why Jason died, I don’t think the world should be told that it was.”

  “I feel the same way. That’s why we’re going to go ahead and investigate it as a murder until we know otherwise.”

  “That’s good of you. I appreciate it.”

  “And speaking of—what can you tell me about a Thomas Owen?”

  “Until a week or two ago, he and Jason were a couple. They’d been together for years. Why?”

  “Just wondering. Who broke up with whom?”

  “From what I understood, from the short phone conversation Jason and I had about it last week, it was Jason who ended it.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, he just said he’d put it off as long as he could, out of concern for Thomas’s mental health. And he said Thomas wasn’t taking it well. Again, why are you asking?”

  “There were a bunch of texts from Thomas on Jason’s phone yesterday. I’m guessing, but it looks like Thomas was expecting to accompany Jason to the premiere.”

  “That’s possible. If they’d still been together, Jason would have taken him—with or without his agent’s blessing.”

  “His agent didn’t approve of his relationship?”

  “His agent didn’t approve of Jason’s orientation. Apparently, it’s harder to find roles for a gay superhero than a straight one.”

  “Maybe we should put his agent on the list of interviewees.”

  “At the bottom, if at all. I met him. Mellow old guy. Listen, Savannah. You and Dirk don’t have to do all the legwork, you know. This investigation of yours . . . count us in.”

  “Always, darlin’. Always.”

  She hung up and sat there, her heart heavy, feeling the weight of her friend’s burden.

  Over the years, she had lost track of how many times Ryan Stone and John Gibson had come to her aid in one way or another. They truly had been her knights in shining armor on so many occasions. And right now, there was nothing she wanted more than to help them in this situation.

  And how are you going to do that, Savannah girl? she asked herself. By proving their friend was murdered?

  If that’s what it takes, a quiet, rational voice deep inside replied. You’re going to uncover the truth. And Dr. Liu says the truth makes any situation better.

  Slowly, Savannah pulled her mind away from the troubling phone conversation and back into her surroundings. Dirk was no longer racing around, putting the Red Pony through her paces. In fact, they had been sitting at a stop sign for a long time.

  As though from far away, she heard it—a deep, rumbling sound. It was a bit like a freight train, a little like a Georgia tornado.

  She turned to look at Dirk and saw that her new husband’s eyes were closed.

  He was sound asleep at the wheel. And snoring like a British bulldog with a barrel over his head.

  She glanced around. Fortunately, there wasn’t another car or pedestrian in sight.

  She reached over, put the car in park, and turned off the key.

  Mario Andretti Junior woke with a start. “Hey, whatcha doin’?”

  “Get out,” she said.

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “We’re changing drivers.”

  “Why? I wasn’t speeding. I slowed down like you asked me to.”

  She laughed. “Oh, you slowed down, all right. Buddy, you were sawin’ logs. I’m gonna take us both home and put us to bed. In this state we’re a danger to society.”

  He got out of the car, and so did she. As they passed each other, rounding the hood, she heard him say, “Damn! First time I talk her into letting me drive the ’Stang and I slept through it!”

  When Savannah pulled the Mustang into her driveway, she and Dirk saw something that didn’t surprise her at all. Her brother, Waycross.

  Why would any young man spend time in an old house trailer alone when he could hang out at his sister’s house and—more important—pass the time with a beautiful young gal who had the hots for him?

  So Savannah didn’t find it unusual to see his car in the driveway or him, stripped to the waist, washing it.

  She also wasn’t surprised that Tammy enjoyed seeing Waycross shirtless. The scrawny little boy who had slipped frogs, snakes, and spiders into her lingerie drawer had grown up to be quite a hunk. Savannah figured that most women between the ages of eight and eighty would take notice of a shirt-free Waycross.

  But what did surprise her—and Dirk, too, judging from his, “Oh! Wow!”—was the sight of his Buick, sparkling in the late-afternoon sunlight. The old classic glistened as if it had just been driven out of a showroom.

  “Holy cow!” she exclaimed. “Would you look at that!”

  “I don’t believe it!” Dirk said, bailing out of the Mustang.

  “Me either. Underneath all that mud and guck, your Buick is blue! I had no idea.”

  “Watch it, smart mouth,” he told her, as they both hurried up to the gleaming old beauty. “I’ve never insulted your Mustang.”

  “The Pony’s color has never been in question.”

  Waycross stood, dripping sponge in hand as they examined his handiwork, a goofy grin on his freckled face. He wiped a bit of soap suds off his cheek with his forearm. “I had a notion there was a good-lookin’ ride underneath there somewhere,” he said. “And sure ’nough. Lookie there. Purdy as a picture.”

  Dirk was too pleased and astonished to be insulted. He shook his head in wonderment. “Waycross, my brother, you are somethin’ else. How’d you do this?”

  Waycross shrugged. “Just applied a bit o’ carnauba wax and a whole lotta elbow grease. She buffed right up, like she was hungry for it.”

  Dirk reached out to caress a sparkling fender, then seemed to think better of it and pulled back his hand. “Man, I don’t even want to touch it. That’s the best it’s ever looked—at least, since I’ve owned it.”

  He walked over to Waycross, gave him a hearty slap on the back, and shook his hand. “I don’t even know where to start to say thank you,” he told the younger man. Dirk reached into his back pocket, took out his wallet, and opened it. “What do I owe you for a job like that?”

  “Git outta here. You’re family now, and besides, you lettin’ me live in your house trailer—that just means the world to me. You’ll never know. It’s the first home of my own I’ve ever had.”

  Savannah felt her heartstrings twang at her little brother’s words. She’d never thought about the fact that Waycross had never had a real home all to himself. Like her and their seven other siblings, she and Waycross had lived in their grandmother’s house, then moved out when they’d become adults.

  But once he was out on his own, poor Waycross had practically lived in the garage where he worked. The owner had allowed him to sleep on a fold-up cot in the attic of the garage—a space that was neither heated i
n the winter nor cooled during the hot, humid Georgia summers.

  He had washed his face and brushed his teeth in the gas station’s restroom and showered at Granny’s.

  So it was no surprise that he considered Dirk’s old trailer luxury accommodations.

  In one sense, Savannah felt sorry for Waycross that he would be so grateful for such a minimal thing as a roof of his own. But on the other hand, she truly felt he was better off for not being spoiled. It took so little to make him so very happy.

  As she walked past him on her way up the drive to the house, she stood on tiptoe and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “I owe you an apple pie for doing that.”

  “You don’t owe me nothin’,” he said. “But if you have a spare pie runnin’ around, makin’ a nuisance of itself, I’ll dispense with it.”

  Savannah laughed, left the boys to bond over the refurbished Buick, and walked into the house.

  There she found Tammy sitting at the desk, working on the computer. One glance at the screen told Savannah that her assistant was researching Jason Tyrone.

  It didn’t have to be much of a case for Tammy Master Sleuth to pounce on it. In fact, just the whiff of mystery was enough for her to pull out her virtual magnifying glass via the Internet.

  “What did you find out there, Miss Tamitha?” Savannah asked her as she settled into her comfy chair and invited the cats to occupy her lap, which they did in a jackrabbit’s heartbeat.

  “Nothing that anybody who reads the tabloids or watches the entertainment news shows on TV wouldn’t know already.”

  “Well, I don’t do either, so fill me in,” Savannah said, as she scratched behind Cleopatra’s ear with one hand and stroked Diamante’s chin with the other.

  “He just broke up with his longtime partner. A guy named—”

  “Thomas Owen.”

  “Wow! You knew that?”

  “Ryan told me. What else?”

  “There were rumors that the breakup was over Alanna Cleary.”

  “A gay couple breaks up over a woman?”

  Tammy shrugged. “Just telling you what I read.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “I ran a credit check on him. And as you might suppose, considering the bazillion millions he got for those last two movies, he was sitting pretty.”

  “Criminal check?”

  “Of course. Nothing. Not even an overdue library book.”

  “Hmmm. Clean as a hound’s tooth, huh? Figures.”

  Tammy turned in her chair and gave Savannah a quizzical look. “I heard Waycross use that phrase the other day. What the heck does it mean? Do hound dogs brush their teeth and floss regularly?”

  At that moment, Dirk came through the front door, and Savannah thought about the toothpaste-speckled, pee-pee-sprinkled bathroom upstairs. “Yes,” she said, “and they always hit the toilet when they take a leak.”

  Dirk shot her a suspicious look. “You gals talking about me?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  Tammy chimed in. “We’re discussing the dental hygiene habits of well-mannered hound dogs . . . I think.”

  He walked over to the desk, pulled Eileen’s list of numbers from his pocket, and waved it under Tammy’s nose. “This is the call history from Jason Tyrone’s cell phone. Think you could track down these numbers for us?”

  She snatched the paper out of his hand, her eyes gleaming with an avarice women usually reserved for sparkly jewelry or cold, hard cash. “Gimme that,” she said.

  A second later, she was typing like a maniac on the computer keyboard, her eyes trained on the monitor.

  “Since the kid’s occupied now,” Savannah said, as she set the cats on the ottoman, “let’s go catch some winks. My eyeballs crossed an hour ago, and the only thing that’s gonna uncross them is a nice, long nap.”

  “Sounds good,” Dirk said, heading for the stairs.

  “Before you go, Dirko,” Tammy called out, still typing and staring at the screen. “There’s a message for you on the machine. I listened, but saved it.”

  “Who is it?”

  Tammy tore herself away from the computer long enough to give him a sweet smile. Then she said, “Your dad.”

  Savannah poured herself a glass of lemonade and gave Dirk some private time upstairs to retrieve his message before she joined him in the bedroom.

  Some minutes later, she found him sitting on the side of the bed, staring at the phone.

  “Everything okay, sugar?” she asked, concerned.

  He nodded.

  “What did your dad have to say?”

  Shrugging, he said, “I don’t know. I haven’t listened to it yet.”

  She held the glass of lemonade out to him, but he shook his head.

  “Do you want me to leave you alone again,” she asked, “so’s you can listen to it alone?”

  “No. I was waiting for you to come up. I wanted you to be here when I . . . you know . . . hear whatever it is.”

  Touched, she put the lemonade on the nightstand and then sat beside him on the bed. “Oh, okay. And here I was trying to give you some privacy.”

  He looked surprised. “You’re my wife now. I don’t need privacy from you.”

  She reached out and took his hand. “That’s sweet.”

  “No. It’s just true. Believe me, after all these years of being alone, I’ve had all the privacy I need.”

  Savannah thought of what he had told her about being given up at birth and raised in an orphanage. As a teenager, he had been adopted by a ruthless man who had used him for slave labor.

  So other than one short-lived, ill-fated marriage, Dirk had been alone his whole life. And like Waycross, who had been denied some of life’s most basic needs, Dirk was deeply grateful for what he had.

  Her heart warmed toward him as she reached over and slipped her arm around his waist. “Pick up your message, darlin’,” she said. “There’s no reason to think it’d be bad news.”

  She ached for him, noticing that his hand was trembling as he reached for the phone on the nightstand.

  Dirk was a big guy, a brave guy, a manly sorta man.

  Ruthless criminals didn’t make him shake. Neither did most dangerous situations. He handled whatever life and the job brought his way with unwavering courage and determination. Sometimes, afterward, he might feel the need for a cold beer and a quiet moment to decompress. But nothing shook him.

  Except this.

  He had been so pleased when Tammy had found his biological parents on the Internet. He’d been happy to discover that they’d been searching for him for decades. And he was ecstatic to find out they were as eager to meet him as he was to see them for the first time.

  But now that the meeting was scheduled—imminent even—he was getting more and more nervous by the moment.

  So nervous that Savannah was worried about him.

  She watched as he punched the appropriate numbers to activate the message replay. He even put it on speakerphone so they both could listen.

  Their silly, playful message ran, “Hi! It’s us, Savannah and Dirk. Leave a message or else. Don’t make us hunt you down . . .”

  A pause, a beep, and then a deep, masculine voice that sounded eerily like Dirk’s said, “Hi, son, and Savannah, too. It’s Richard. Hope you guys are okay. We’re getting packed up and all that. I had the car serviced today, and we talked to the neighbor kid about feeding the cat, so we’re about ready to go. We’re real excited.” He took a deep breath. “Well, I’m excited. Your mom, she’s . . . well, she is in a little bit of the dither. Actually, she is in a lot of a dither. It’s not that she doesn’t want to see you. It’s just that she has these bad feelings, you know, about how things turned out and all that.”

  Savannah glanced at Dirk to see how he was taking this news. The expression on his face looked as worried as his father’s voice sounded.

  Not good, she thought. Problems already, and they haven’t even arrived yet.

  She reached o
ver, took Dirk’s hand, and gave it a comforting squeeze.

  “Anyway,” Richard continued, “I just wanted to touch base and say that I can’t wait to see you, son, and your new wife, too. We’ll give you another call once we’re on our way.”

  Dirk replaced the phone on its base. “Well, that was nice of him, to call and all.”

  Savannah nodded a little too vigorously. “It was. Very nice. He sounds like a nice guy, a good guy.”

  “Yeah, he does. But what’s that business about my mom? What sort of dither? I don’t really like females who’re in a dither.”

  He gave Savannah a quick look. “Or guys either,” he quickly added. “People in dithers just aren’t that great to be around, male or female.”

  “Good save.”

  “Thank you. I try.”

  Savannah stood and nudged him off the bed so that she could fold down the covers. “I think a bit of dithering—or even a lot of it—is to be expected under the circumstances.”

  “Really?” He stood and peeled off his shirt. He started to toss it onto a nearby chair, then thought better of it, walked to the closet, and pitched it into a hamper she had given him a few weeks earlier—along with detailed instructions on how to use said piece of delicate machinery.

  “Lift the lid, toss in the clothes, close the lid.”

  After numerous spirited discussions on the topic, he had managed to follow the directions fairly well.

  Getting him to close the closet door afterward—that was a lesson for another time.

  “Yes,” she said. “Your mom’s entitled to have some misgivings, some trepidation about meeting her son for the first time since, well, you know . . .”

  “Since she gave me away?”

  “Exactly. I sure wouldn’t wanna be in her shoes when she walks up to our front door. Would you?”

  “But Tammy said she was forced to, that she was just a kid and—”

  “And I believe she’ll tell you all about it when she gets here.”

  “You think?”

  “Probably.”

  Savannah watched him climb into bed. Such a big man. Rugged. A male. So completely, absolutely adult. And yet there was something about his lower lip—the slightly tremulous set of it. Something about the sad and guarded look in his eyes that told her there was a little boy lurking inside that grown-up body. A kid who had spent his childhood in an orphanage and wanted to know why.