Chapter 16
As Dirk watched Savannah pick the lock of Jason Tyrone’s Greek revival mansion on a hilltop in Beverly Hills, he was speaking on his cell phone to Tammy. “I don’t suppose an old place like this has an alarm system,” he said. “But could you find out? The last thing we need is to alert the whole neighborhood the moment we get in the door.”
“How are you getting in without a key?” Tammy asked.
He sniffed. “I have Savannah with me, and you would ask a question like that?”
“Oh, right. Duh.”
“She’s going to have it open in about five seconds, so if you could check on that alarm system for me . . .”
“Or if you could have given me more than a five-second warning, I might have been able to help you. You know, Dirko, I can perform the impossible on demand. But it’s nice if I can have two minutes or so.”
“Never mind,” he said, as he followed Savannah through the newly opened door and into the foyer of the old plantation-style house. He looked around, searching the walls with their cabbage rose–print paper.
“There’s no alarm box,” Savannah told him. “I would’ve seen it through the beveled glass in the front door. And I wouldn’t have picked the lock if there’d been one.”
She walked over to him, took the phone out of his hand, and said into it, “We’ve got it, babycakes. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“It was no trouble,” came Tammy’s polite reply. “But give Dirk a big, nasty raspberry for me, when you get a chance.”
“You’ve got it, kid.” Savannah turned off the phone, handed it back to Dirk, stuck her tongue out at him, and gave him a grotesque, wet, noisy raspberry—as requested.
“That’s from Tammy,” she said.
He grimaced. “I sorta figured. One of these days, if she becomes my sister-in-law, she’s going to have to start showing me some respect.”
“Why? I’m your wife and I don’t show you respect.”
“True.”
The playful grin she gave him belied her words. That was one of the things she liked best about Dirk—it was almost impossible to really, deeply insult him. He knew she would die for him in an instant; it had been that way for years, even back when she was just his partner on the force. So a bit of mountain oyster breaking once in a while could be overlooked.
“What do you reckon we’re going to find here?” she asked him.
“You know the drill. We never know what we’re looking for until we find it.”
As they walked across the black and white checked floor of the foyer, Savannah looked up at the gracefully curved staircase with its elegant wrought-iron and wooden railings, and she had to resist the urge to hum “Dixie.”
“All that’s missing,” she said, “is a Southern belle in a hooped skirt floating down the stairs.”
“I know what you mean,” he replied. “The theme from Gone with the Wind keeps running through my head.”
They walked into the parlor, which was decorated with exquisite, Victorian-era antiques. A matched pair of diamond-tucked fainting couches in claret velvet were drawn up to a massive fireplace with a carved mantel. And everywhere Savannah looked she saw luxurious fabrics that invited a touch. A fringed, brocaded scarf was spread over an old piano. Drapes of thick, lush velvet hung from the windows.
And on the walls hung mirrors, scenic paintings, and portraits, all in gilded frames.
“It might be a little bit gaudy in some ways,” Savannah admitted, “but it’s still an awesome place. It reminds me of that antebellum mansion just outside of my hometown. You were there. Remember Judge Patterson’s old house?”
“How could I forget? That was the spookiest place I’ve ever been. This one isn’t so dark or creepy, but then, nobody got murdered here.”
“That we know of.”
“Yes, that we know of,” he said. “But does this look to you like a house that a guy like Jason would live in?”
“That wouldn’t be my first guess,” she replied. “But when it comes to people, you just never know. Maybe he was an Elvis fan, like you, and this place reminded him of Graceland.”
Dirk nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that would work for me.”
“Then if someday one of those lottery tickets you’re always buying pays off big, are you gonna buy me a place like this?”
He slipped his arm around her waist and gave her a big squeeze. “If that’s what you want, babe, that’s what you’ll get. We’ll name it Graceland West.”
“And Granny will come visit us, and we’ll never be able to get rid of her.”
“That’s fine with me. I never get enough of your grandma.” He paused for a moment and gave her a nervous smile. “I hope you feel the same way about my family, once you get to know them.”
“If they’re even the least bit like you, darlin’, I’m gonna be crazy about ’em.”
“Is that true?”
“Why, of course it is, babycakes. Leastwise, till I change my mind.”
“That’s reassuring. . . . I think.”
As they meandered through the mansion, they grew increasingly frustrated, failing to find anything they would classify as significant.
The refrigerator was filled with all sorts of liquid concoctions. Most of the labels bore the words “super” and “energy” and the omnipresent “power.”
Looking over the bottles and jars, Savannah shook her head and said, “You couldn’t make a decent meal out of the ingredients in this icebox. Human beings weren’t meant to live on liquefied lettuce.”
“Except Tammy,” Dirk added.
“Yes, except for our Tammy, who could run a marathon and light up a lighthouse with the energy she gets out of one measly carrot.”
They found not one, but three separate workout rooms brimming with heavy steel contraptions that Savannah didn’t recognize. They looked like medieval torture devices.
“Boy, I wish I had some of this stuff at home,” Dirk said in a tone usually used by little boys who were coveting their best friend’s train set. “I could put it in the garage and—”
“And I could hang the laundry on it, as soon as I took it out of the dryer,” she interjected gleefully. “No more wrinkles!”
“That’s almost blasphemous. You don’t know what he’s got here. This is about a zillion dollars worth of the highest-tech bodybuilding equipment in the world.”
Savannah gave the world’s best-equipped private gym a dismissive wave of her hand as she walked out of the room. “Any guy who spends more money on a stationary bike than a private limousine that can actually take him somewhere—well, that guy’s two pups short of a litter.”
“I didn’t see you pooh-poohing the results when you were gawking at him up there on the screen.”
“That’s when I thought it was all natural. Now that I’m learning all he had to do to get it, I’m plum disillusioned.”
They proceeded on to the master bedroom, where they found only one thing that was ever-so-slightly interesting.
“Look at this,” Savannah said, pointing to a framed picture on the nightstand. It was a glamour head shot of Alanna Cleary. It had been signed in the lower right-hand corner, “Love always, ’Lanna.”
Instinctively, Savannah pulled out the top drawer of the nightstand and looked inside. There it was—a similar photograph of Thomas Owen. And like Alanna’s, it was signed, “Love always, Tom.”
“Never believe what you read scribbled on a picture,” Savannah told Dirk, showing him Thomas’s photo. “One day you think your love’s gonna last forever, and the next day you’re facedown in a drawer, staring at a TV remote control and some empty condom wrappers.”
“Life sucks.”
“For some more than others.”
Savannah closed the drawer. As she walked around the room, she couldn’t help noticing how many mirrors there were. The front of the armoire, the wall over the dresser, the back of some bookcases, a standing cheval mirror, and several tabletops—all had mirrors. A
nd on the underside of the canopy suspended over the bed were bronzed mirror tiles.
It occurred to her that, if you were making love in Jason’s bed, you could not only watch and critique your own performance, but the bronzed mirrors would give your image a nice tan as well.
She said, “Tammy mentioned that part of this disorder is an obsession with constantly looking at yourself in mirrors.”
“Hey, the jury’s already come back with the verdict on Jason having that bigorexia thing. But that’s not what we’re trying to find here.”
Savannah was standing in front of the closet, which held only the most mundane contents—the simple evidence of a man leading a surprisingly simple life.
Except for a deadly disorder.
“That’s true,” she said. “We’re looking for evidence that might indicate he was murdered. And we aren’t finding it.”
She turned back to Dirk. She could see her own frustration reflected in his eyes. “This is just so weird,” she told him. “Finding out that somebody died accidentally rather than as a result of foul play—that’s good news, right?”
“Yeah. You’d think so anyway.”
“So why does all this good news make me feel sick to my stomach?”
“Me too.”
“Oh, crap! I forgot all about the futon!” Savannah said that night as she, Dirk, and the kitties cuddled in bed.
“The what?” he asked. He rolled away from her, as the romantic mood he had been trying to kindle dissipated.
“The futon. You know, the fold-out bed thing-a-ma-doodle for the guest room.”
“What guest room? You mean my man cave?”
Her annoyance meter ticked up a few notches. She wasn’t in the mood for any static tonight—especially when it had to do with making his parents comfortable during their weeklong stay.
“Just FYI,” she said, “for the time that your folks are here, you don’t have a man cave.”
He rose up onto one elbow, and she could feel him staring at her in the darkness. “But that’s my room, my sanctuary. That’s where I get away from it all.”
“And by ‘all’ you mean me.”
It took him so long to answer that she knew she’d scored several points with that one.
But Dirk was as good at offense as defense. “You told me that you like it when I watch my boxing in my cave and let you watch your chick flicks in the living room.”
He had her there. If she were truthful, she would admit that the man cave benefited her as much as it did him. If she had to be totally honest, she would admit that, as a person who had lived alone for years, she greatly enjoyed those precious moments of solitude.
But honesty was sometimes overrated in the middle of a marital spat.
“I know you enjoy watching your sports alone,” she said, with just the right touch of whine in her voice. “And being an independent woman, I don’t take it personally when my husband expresses a need to be alone once in a while.”
He lay back down and cleared his throat.
She knew the old throat-clearing trick. He used it when he was trying to think of a good reply and needed to buy some time. Finally, he said, “I appreciate that, Van. I hear other guys complaining that their wives demand their attention all the time. I’m glad you’re not like that.”
She could hear a note of apology in his words, and she felt a little bit ashamed of herself. She reached over and trailed her hand down his arm. “Thank you, sugar. You’re the best husband on God’s green earth,” she said. “And I gotta tell you, if I had a woman cave, we’d use that instead when your folks are here.”
“It’s okay. I understand. I just hope they don’t mind sleeping in a room that’s decorated with Harley stuff.”
Savannah groaned inwardly, sensing that their momentary peace was about to be shattered all over again. “No, darlin’,” she said. “It ain’t the two of them who’s gonna be sleeping in there. It’s you and me.”
“What?”
This time he sat straight up. The movement was so abrupt and violent that one of the cats bounded out of bed and ran from the room.
“You heard me, sweet cheeks,” she said in her softest, least confrontational, good ol’ girl voice. “You and I will sleep in there, and they’ll be in here.”
“But this is our bedroom! It’s like, sacred or something.”
Savannah resisted the urge to tell him that, until a few weeks ago, this had been her bedroom. And she certainly hadn’t kicked up this much of a fuss when she needed to share it with him.
“Dirk, listen to me. . . . They’ll be our guests. And the rules of Southern hospitality are clear on this point. You give guests—especially out-of-state guests who’ve driven the length of the West Coast to come see you—the best bed in the house. And that’s this one.”
“But my back! I just now got used to this bed change. If I have to adjust to another one this soon I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“You won’t die, you little hothouse orchid you.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“That hothouse orchid thing you call me sometimes. What do you mean by that?”
Savannah felt like the frayed elastic in her favorite pair of panties was just about to snap.
“It means,” she said, “stop acting like such a tender buttercup and show me some of that Navy Seal, manly man stuff you claim to have.”
“I never claimed to be a Navy Seal.”
“No, but you’re always telling me that you’re pretty sure you could pass their training regimen. And you make me watch those stupid videos of them running on the beach, carrying that big log over their heads, crawling through the mud, and—”
“Stupid?! The Navy Seals aren’t stupid! Why, they’re the greatest fighting machines in the whole wide—”
“I didn’t say the Seals are stupid. They’re amazing, absolutely wonderful! But after watching all those videos of them with you a hundred times, I’ve practically memorized them, and—”
“And now if I want to watch one of those great videos, maybe with my dad and do a little father-son bonding, we won’t even have a proper man cave to do it in!”
Savannah lay there on her back, staring up at the ceiling, doing the arithmetic in her head. Her parents-in-law were going to leave the Seattle area early tomorrow morning. And according to the latest message that Dirk’s dad, Richard, had left on their machine, they estimated they would arrive at their hotel in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon.
They intended to squeeze in a trip to Alcatraz before having a wonderful seafood dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf. The next morning they would get up early and, taking the scenic Pacific Coast Highway, arrive in San Carmelita about eight hours later.
Did that give her enough time to commit husband-cide and thoroughly dispose of the body?
That last part was most important, because if Dirk ever turned up dead in their county, his body would be taken to Dr. Liu’s morgue.
And since she had known him and Savannah so long and so well, the coroner would instantly deduce—without even an autopsy or any investigation—that Savannah was the culprit.
Of course, Dr. Liu could be counted on to testify at her trial. She could probably convince the jury single-handedly that Savannah had been driven to utter insanity by Dirk’s eccentricities and was in no way responsible for her actions.
But there was one fatal flaw in Savannah’s master plan.
Dirk’s dad was a retired cop.
And if he’d been half as good at his job as his son was at his, he’d nail her for sure.
Putting her evil plans aside—at least for the moment—Savannah rolled over toward her husband and slipped her arm around his waist. “It’ll be okay, sugar,” she whispered into the darkness. “We’ll get the most comfortable futon we can find. And I promise, I’ll do my best to keep you happy on it. Let’s just say, we’ll make sure it’s firm.” She giggled. “And I’m not even talking about the mattress.”
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br /> She waited for his lusty response. Very early in their married life, she had learned that a simple reference to tomfoolery would lift his mood several notches instantly.
But when no response was forthcoming, she started to worry a little. Maybe he was madder than she’d thought.
“Dirk? Honey? Did you hear me?”
Finally, he responded. With a wall-shaking snore.
Chapter 17
As Savannah sat next to Dirk in one of the wooden pews of the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, with Ryan and John to her left and Tammy and Waycross in the row behind her, she couldn’t help feeling a little guilty for several reasons.
First, she felt uneasy about the fact that she and her entourage had been allowed to attend the small, private funeral when thousands of others had been turned away.
The tiny chapel—one of three lovely churches located inside the famous cemetery Forest Lawn—held less than a hundred visitors at a time. So she had been surprised when Ryan had told her that Jason’s manager had invited not only him and John, but the rest of Savannah’s Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency as well.
“He appreciates the work you’ve all done on Jason’s behalf,” Ryan had said. “And he wants you at the service, if you can make it.”
If they could make it?
If they could attend an event in a venue as wonderful as this charming and famous little chapel? Of course they could. She would’ve been there with bells on, if bells were appropriate funeral attire.
Instead Savannah wore a somber black dress, and Dirk had dusted off his only suit, which was navy. And although they had discussed acceptable animal prints, Tammy had opted for an eggplant sheath. Waycross had borrowed Dirk’s old sports coat.
And now she sat here with her team, feeling guilty, because she couldn’t keep her mind on what the minister up front was saying. Her mind was even straying from the deceased, who lay in the closed coffin at the front of the church.
She couldn’t help thinking about this building and its luminous history.
Inside these stone walls, beneath the dark, wooden ceiling with its heavy, arched beams, so many beloved celebrities had gathered to memorialize and celebrate each other.
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