Corpse Suzette (15 page)

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

T
ammy 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 minute. 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.”