Death by Chocolate (15 page)

Chapter

“T
here’s nothing on earth
like a big, juicy pork chop
JL
to cheer that guy up,” Savannah told
Tammy as she threw a couple more pieces of meat on her backyard grill.

Tammy glanced over at Dirk,
who was sprawled on a chaise lounge, a drowsy smile on his face, a beer in one
hand, his empty plate in the other. He was past “satisfied” and was coming
‘round the bend toward “sated.” Another chop should do the trick.

With a pair of tongs,
Savannah removed a few more ears of foil-wrapped corn from the coals and placed
them on the platter that Tammy was holding. “Make sure John gets another one of
those,” she said. “Don’t let Dirk have them all.”

As Tammy walked away with
the corn, Ryan left the picnic table where he had been sitting with John and
walked over to the grill. He gave her a smile that gave her shivers, in spite
of the warm evening and the proximity of the grill.

“You’ve outdone yourself,
Savannah,” he told her. “As usual, dinner was fantastic. One of these nights
soon, you’ll have to let us take you out to Chez Antoine. He makes an amazing
chateaubriand, and his chocolate crème brûlée is orgasmic.”

“I don’t think I’ll be free
for a while.” Savannah gave a little nod in Cordele’s direction. She was
sitting by herself in a chair under the arbor, staring into space, a bottle of
Tammy’s mineral water in her hand.

“Ah, that’s all right. The
more Reid girls, the merrier.”

“Not necessarily,” she
muttered, brushing some sauce on the chops and stifling a sneeze and a sniffle.

Ryan studied Cordele
thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Your sister does seem a bit depressed this evening,”
he whispered. “Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing out of the
ordinary. For her, ‘depressed’ is more of a lifestyle than a mood.”

“That’s too bad. But still,
John and I would love to take the two of you out for dinner. Heaven knows, we
owe you some hospitality after all the great meals you’ve prepared for us
recently.”

“Are you kidding? You don’t
owe me diddly-squat. Dirk is out of his funk—that’s worth a fortune right
there.”

Ryan shrugged. “I don’t
know how much we had to do with that.”

“More than you think. Just
knowing that he’s going to get some help with this case perked him right up. Of
course, he’d never admit that’s the reason he’s cheerful.”

“He doesn’t usually even
admit to being cheerful.”

“How true.”

“So, when are we going to
review what you’ve got on the case?”

“Right after the peach and
blackberry cobbler.”

“What? No chocolate cake?”

She made a face. “Please, I
may never eat chocolate cake again. The phone’s been ringing off the hook with
reporters wanting to get a statement from me. Apparently, it was leaked that
Eleanor, Queen of Chocolate, didn’t die of natural causes, and they all want to
talk to her so-called bodyguard who blew it.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, between losing a
client and nursing a cold, I’ve had better weeks. But then, compared to Eleanor
Maxwell’s week....”

Dirk sauntered over to the
grill, his empty plate in his hand and an expectant look on his face.

“Okay, okay, here you go.”
She plopped a couple more chops on his plate. “Don’t ever say that we don’t
feed you around here.”

“When I dish the dirt about
you, Van, I never mention that.”

She raised one eyebrow and
shook her tongs at him. “Never say ‘dirt’ to somebody who prepares your food.”
He gave his chops a suspicious look but walked back to his chaise and dug in
anyway.

Savannah chuckled. “It
takes a lot more than the fear of a little contamination to put Dirk Coulter
off his chow,” she said.

Later, as they gathered
around the kitchen table to have dessert and coffee, Savannah slid a bowl of
cobbler laden with vanilla ice cream in front of Cordele.

“You do still eat cobbler,
don’t you?” Savannah said. “It used to be your favorite. You always asked for
that instead of a birthday cake, remember?”

A look of agony crossed
Cordele’s face as she wrestled with the decision on whether to indulge or
refrain.

Tammy sat down beside her
and picked up a spoon. “Ah, go ahead. A little refined sugar and flour once in
a while won’t hurt you. It’s a special occasion.”

Soon everyone had a bowl of
warm cobbler à la mode and was happily munching away.

“Remember when we used to
go picking blackberries by the roadsides in the fall?” Savannah said, trying to
draw Cordele into some sort of meaningful social interaction with her friends.
“That was fun, huh?”

Cordele didn’t look up from
her bowl. ‘Yeah, I remember. We used to get our arms all scratched up. It hurt
something fierce.”

Silence around the table.
Everyone exchanged awkward glances, but nobody said anything.

“My brothers and I used to
raid a neighbor’s apple orchard,” Ryan finally offered.

“Oh, that sounds like fun,”
Savannah said brightly. Cordele took a deep breath. “Remember when we were
picking berries on the side of the highway that time, and we found a dead cat
caught in the briars? I remember that like it was yesterday. That ol’ cat was
half-rotten and had flies buzzin’ all over it.”

Savannah sat, frozen, spoon
halfway to her mouth, staring at her sister.

“I gotta tell you,” Cordele
continued. “It took the fun out of berry picking for me. Between finding that
rotten cat and the briars scratching you all up, it just wasn’t worth it.”

Slowly Savannah stood and
walked, trancelike, from the kitchen and into the living room. Tammy got up
from her seat and followed her.

“Where are you going?”
Tammy whispered, tugging at her sweater sleeve.

“To get a weapon,” Savannah
replied. “What do you figure would be best: a rope, a knife, a candlestick, or
a gun?”

“That depends,” Tammy said.
“Are you talking homicide or suicide?”

“I figure I’ll kill her
first, then myself.”

“I see. Well, in that
case....” Tammy gave it several moments of serious thought. “Gun. Yeah,
definitely the Beretta.”

“Really? You think so?
Why?”

“It would be too much work
bludgeoning yourself to death with a candlestick.”

She nodded. “Good point.
Thanks.”

“Anytime. What are friends
for?”

With the dishes done, the
cats fed, and Cordele in the living room reading her mystery novel, the
Moonlight Magnolia team sat around the dining room table, studying the files
that Dirk had confiscated from Martin Streck.

After comparing facts and
figures for about an hour, they came to the same conclusion. “Streck’s been
embezzling from Eleanor for a long time,” Tammy said.

“No kidding,” Ryan replied.
“He’s just about bled her estate dry.”

“And didn’t you mention,”
John added, “that she and her husband had a recent parting of the ways, so to
speak?”

“Their divorce became final
about a month ago.” Dirk shoved back from the table and stretched his arms.

“A lot of things come to
light during a divorce,” Tammy said. “Do you suppose either Eleanor or Burt
figured out what Martin was up to?”

Savannah shook her head. “I
guarantee you that Eleanor didn’t know. She was the sort of gal that, if she
had found out somebody was cheating her, she’d have chopped them up into paté
and fed them to those hounds of hers.”

“Maybe Streck hadn’t yet
been exposed, but was afraid he would be,” Ryan suggested. “Perhaps he thought
if he knocked off Eleanor, he could rig the books to hide his tampering from
Burt.”

“He
was
taking off with
these files when we caught him,” Dirk said. “And that maid, Marie, told you
that we should be lookin’ at him.”

“Yes, but she wouldn’t say
why.” Savannah took a blank sheet of paper and drew a small box at the top. “I
suppose that if I’d been cashing in my client’s CDs, selling off their stocks,
and dipping into their bank accounts and skimming off their savings, I’d be
pretty nervous about getting caught.”

“Nervous enough to kill
somebody?” Tammy said. Savannah glanced into the living room, where Cordele was
curled up in the big chair with her book. “Oh, sure,” she said. “If there’s
fifty ways to leave a lover, there’s gotta be a thousand reasons to commit
murder.”

She scribbled Martin
Streck’s name in the box at the top of the page. He had just been promoted to
“Suspect Number One.”

Chapter

S
avannah had often wondered
how Greenwoods Cemetery had gotten its name. Standing among the grave markers
that lay flush with the earth was the occasional palmetto. But there wasn’t a
woods, or even a leafy tree, in sight. And since the drought-inspired water
restrictions had required southern Californians to shower together, flush only
when necessary, and water the lawns not at all, Greenwoods Cemetery wasn’t
looking particularly green, either.

Long ago, Savannah had
decided that when she kicked the bucket, she wanted to be carted back to
Georgia, where she could lie beneath the weeping willows near her beloved
grandfather.

She had attended a
depressing amount of funerals in this cemetery. And today’s ceremonial burying
was equally somber, as they laid Lady Eleanor Maxwell to rest.

Surveying the crowd that
stretched from the open grave, surrounded by chairs across the beige lawns to
the road, she wondered how many of the mourners had actually ever met Eleanor
in the flesh and how many were simply groupie gourmets.

“Quite a crowd,” Dirk
remarked. “I’ll bet there won’t be anywhere near this many when I go toes-up.”

“Unless it’s in the line of
duty, and then there’ll be cops from here to San Diego,” Savannah replied.

When he didn’t answer, she
turned and looked at him. He was just staring at her. “Don’t even say that,” he
told her. “It’s bad luck.”

“Oh, pooh. Gran says that
if you speak an evil out loud, it won’t come true. Besides, you’re too mean to
die. You’ll live to be a hundred and four and irritate us all the whole time.”

He lowered his voice. “Nice
theory, but it didn’t work for her.” He nodded toward the casket that hung on
thick canvas straps over the grave.

“Sh-h-h.” She glanced around,
but the only one who had overheard was Tammy, who was standing on the other
side of Dirk.

“Keep it down, Dirko,”
Tammy told him. “It’s customary to only say nice things about people at their
funerals.”

“Yeah,” Savannah added.
“You keep the really juicy, nasty stuff to yourself and save it for the evening
of the funeral, when everybody’s comparing notes about who took it hard and who
didn’t seem to give a hoot.”

Tammy’s mouth dropped open.
“I haven’t been to a lot of funerals. Do people really do that?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Savannah
told her. ‘You can’t win with the gossips. If you cry too much, they’ll say you
‘just plumb fell apart and made a spectacle of yourself,’ and if you don’t cry
enough, they’ll claim that you ‘never did give a fig anyway’ about the recently
departed. You’re damned if you do and if you don’t.”

“Wow.” Tammy shook her head
in disbelief. “I’d think that how someone grieves is a personal matter.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you
get for thinkin’,” Dirk said. “And speaking of who’s taking it hard and who
ain’t...” He nodded to the circle of Eleanor’s immediate family and friends who
were sitting in chairs at the gravesite.

Savannah’s eyes went
automatically to Gilly, who sat between her mother and Sydney Linton. The
little girl seemed bewildered by all that was going on around her. Savannah’s
big-sister persona longed to hug the child, give her a glass of milk and some
chocolate chip cookies, and read her a story.

Louise had a dazed look on
her face that Savannah suspected was pharmaceutically induced. Nerve pills, no
doubt. She wasn’t likely to do that cookie/story routine tonight, no matter how
badly her daughter might need it.

But the chauffeur seemed to
be concerned for Gilly. He was holding her hand and whispering to her from time
to time. Whatever he was saying appeared to be helping. She would look up at
him, nod, and smile just a little.

A minister appeared, walked
to the head of the grave, and opened his prayer book. The crowd fell silent as
the familiar “dust to dust” and “ashes to ashes” passage was read, followed by
the Lord’s Prayer.

Savannah watched Martin
Streck, who stood behind Louise, his hand on her shoulder, trying to read his
face and demeanor. It would have been nice to pick up a sense of guilt or fear
from him, but she didn’t. Other than a mild concern for Louise, he seemed
pretty unaffected by the whole thing.

Marie sat on the other side
of Sydney. She was the only one present—other than Gilly—who seemed to be
genuinely distressed. Although she was wearing dark glasses, she was constantly
wiping her eyes and nose with a lace handkerchief she held, knotted, in her
hand. Her black dress made her seem even more pale and gaunt than usual.

Savannah didn’t recognize
the good-looking blond fellow who sat on Louise’s other side. But from his age
and the resemblance between him and Louise, Savannah assumed he was Louise’s
father, Burt Maxwell.

Eleanor’s ex, she thought.
Hm-m-m... definitely cuter than she had been.

Standing behind Burt was
Kaitlin Dover and several others that Savannah recognized from the crew that
had been taping in the studio barn.

They were all wearing long
faces, and Savannah wondered if it was because Eleanor had died or because they
had lost a steady gig. From what she had heard, jobs in Hollywood were few and
far between these days. Even a difficult boss like Eleanor Maxwell was better
than no boss at all.

The minister had finished,
and, one by one, they were filing past the closed coffin, each person dropping
a single red rose onto the highly polished top.

Louise carelessly tossed
her flower onto the casket, then turned to her daughter, whose rose was pale
pink. “Go ahead,” she told her.

Savannah’s heart ached as
she watched the little girl kiss the face of the flower, then gently place it
on her grandmother’s coffin.

Sydney laid his down next,
then took Gilly by the hand and led her across the lawn after Louise. They made
their way to the classic Jaguar parked nearby. Sydney opened the door, assisted
mother and child inside, and took his place in the driver’s seat.

Nearby, more than a dozen
reporters’ cameras clicked and whirred. Savannah saw at least three TV news
crews filming the proceedings. Lady Eleanor was a hot story, especially now
that word was out that she had been murdered.

They all focused on the
Jaguar as it pulled away.

“It just occurred to me,”
Savannah said. “You know who’s
not
here?”

“Who?” Tammy asked.

“Anybody who even looks
remotely like Eleanor. And she’s supposed to have an identical twin sister
named Elizabeth.”

Dirk shrugged. “Maybe she
lives out of state and couldn’t make it.”

“Nope. She lives in Twin
Oaks.”

“That’s only fifteen
minutes down the freeway,” Dirk said. “Wonder why she didn’t show?”

“Maybe she didn’t like her
sister,” Savannah suggested, trying not to think of Cordele at the moment she
muttered the words.

“Or,” Tammy said, “maybe
she didn’t want to show up and have everybody critique her manner of grieving.
I sure wouldn’t.”

Against her better judgment,
Savannah invited Cordele to go to the mall with her. Ordinarily, she would
never have taken anyone but Tammy when she was hoping to do an interview. But
Cordele’s face had fallen when Savannah suggested that she might want to stay
at home and finish her mystery. So she had caved and asked her to come along.

After the funeral, Dirk had
said he
weis
going to go after
Burt Maxwell, to see if he could “squeeze him for a little juice about Martin
Streck, or anybody else,” as he had delicately put it. Savannah had offered to
go to the mall restaurant where Eleanor’s twin sister, Elizabeth, worked.

Savannah had meant well,
inviting Cordele to come along, but now she was having second thoughts. It
wasn’t going to be easy, telling Cordele to get lost for a few minutes. She was
bound to take it personally and be insulted. Cordele took it personally if it
rained too hard in her vicinity.

“You don’t mind, do you,”
Savannah said as they pulled into the parking lot next to the food court, “if I
go into the restaurant alone at first and see if this gal’s even working today?
If she isn’t, we’ll both go to the nail salon and get a French manicure. How
does that sound?”

The face fell... again.

“Come on, sugar,” Savannah
pleaded. “I really need to do this one little thing by myself, and then you and
I can shop or get a Mrs. Fields cookie or.... oh, right... you don’t eat
cookies. I’ll buy you a frozen yogurt. With sprinkles or fruit on top. Whatever
you want. How’s that? Cordele?”

Cordele sat in the
passenger’s seat, staring out the side window, giving Savannah a fine view of
the back of her head.

Savannah wanted to smack
her. This was ridiculous, having to bribe a woman who was nearly thirty years
old as if she were four and getting the cold-shoulder, silent treatment in
return.

“Why did you even invite me
if you were just going to get me here and then dump me?” Cordele finally said,
still staring out the window.

“I told you when I asked
you along that this would be a combination of business and pleasure. Let me
take care of a little bit of business and then we’ll have some fun. We’ll go to
Victoria’s Secret and sample their new perfumes and maybe go play with some
puppies in the pet store.”

“No. I never go to pet
stores.”

Savannah was afraid to ask why.
But she had a feeling she would find out anyway, so....

“Why don’t you go into pet
stores, Cordele?”

“Because it hurts too much.
It reminds me that I never had a dog of my own when I was a kid. And I wanted a
dog that—”

“What about Gulliver? We
had that old sheep dog for ages. And Colonel Beauregard. He’s the finest hound
in the county.”

“But they were the
family’s
dogs, not my own personal pet. I wanted an animal that was just mine, that I
didn’t have to share with a thousand brothers and sisters. If I’d had a dog I
would have taught him to fetch and to roll over and—”

“Meet you in twenty minutes
at the fountain in front of Sears.”

Savannah got out of the car
and slammed the door behind her. “I wish I’d known that not having a pet of
your own would scar you for life, Cordele,” she muttered to herself as she
walked across the lot to the mall entrance. “Hell, I would have gone out in the
woods and trapped a skunk for you. That would’ve been fun.... watching you
teach a polecat to fetch and roll over. Gr-r-r-rr.”

She was dimly aware that
several people were watching her with looks that varied from curious to
alarmed. Obviously they thought this angry woman who was talking to herself and
growling under her breath might present a threat to society.

“Eh, screw ‘em,” she added
at the end of her soliloquy. “If they had a sister like Cordele, they’d be
nutty, too.”

She located the restaurant
on the mall map that was mounted just inside the entrance. Straight ahead and
to her right. It had been years since she had visited the Twin Oaks Mall, and
she was surprised at how much it had grown. They had added two new wings, where
specialty shops sold everything from gourmet coffees to stained-glass lamps,
silk flower arrangements to high-tech sports equipment and video games.

Tucked between a bookstore
and a candle shop was the Rain Forest Café. The restaurant was a bright and
cheerful establishment with plenty of skylights, a profusion of green plants,
and tropical-themed murals on the walls that gave it the ambiance of a South
American jungle.

Not that the sounds of
parrots and monkeys caused Savannah to think of food. And apparently, the décor
had a similar effect on the other mall visitors. Other than a family in a booth
in the back and a teenage couple at a table up front, the restaurant was empty
except for the employees.

The bored waiters and
waitresses wore khaki safari shirts and shorts with straw hats. The uniform
looked almost cute on the younger ones, but ridiculous on the woman serving
behind the bar—a middle-aged, heavy-set woman who was a dead ringer for Eleanor
Maxwell.

Savannah walked over to the
bar, which served nothing but nonalcoholic smoothies, and waited for Elizabeth
to come over. When she did, Savannah was greeted with a less than cordial,
‘Yeah.... what can I get you?”

Hm-m-m, she thought, grumpy
runs in the family. “A pineapple-strawberry flip,” she said.

Elizabeth trudged down to
the other end of the bar, threw some fruit and ice into a blender, and pushed
the button. The concoction was quickly whipped into a froth, which she poured
into a tall soda-fountain glass.

Poking a straw into it, she
shoved the drink under Savannah’s nose. ‘That’ll be five-fifty,” she announced,
drumming her fingers impatiently on the bar.

“Five-fifty? Wow! ” Savannah
said. ‘That’s pricey for a milk shake with no milk in it.”

Elizabeth reached out and
seized the drink. “Do you want the smoothie or not, lady? I got work to do
here.” Savannah made a point of looking deliberately up and down the empty bar.
Then she said, “I’ll take it,” and handed the woman a ten-dollar bill.