Death by Chocolate (22 page)

“By the way. It’s not
you
I’m rejecting. I love you to pieces. It’s just the bitterness and the friggin’
whining I can’t stand.”

Oh, yeah.... that little
addition helped a lot, she thought as she continued up the stairs. So glad I
tagged that on the end there.

It was when she reached the
top of the stairs that heard Cordele’s final diagnosis floating up to her:
“Denial. Denial is such a destructive force. No doubt it’s the root of that
food issue...”

Savannah lay In her bed,
reading Eleanor Maxwell’s journal, as she had almost every night since her
death. And while Savannah had spent most of the evening being peeved and out of
sorts, thanks to her heart-to-heart with Cordele, she felt a little better
having read the diary. It proved exactly what she had told Cordele in the heat
of their argument: somebody, somewhere, always had it worse.

“Hindsight don’t need
spectacles,” Gran had always said. And it seemed, as Savannah read the pages of
the journal, that Eleanor should have seen it coming. Louise hated her mother
with an intensity that could have motivated her to do anything, including
commit murder.

This journal would prove to
be a powerful piece of evidence in prosecuting her. Savannah could hardly wait
to show Dirk the passage she was reading now. It had been written only three
months ago.

Lou hit me with a wine
bottle today. Cut my head open. Had to get five stitches. They didn’t recognize
me at the hospital. Wouldn’t that be great if the news got hold of that?
Kaitlin would throw a fit. The cops wanted me to file charges on her, but she’s
my kid. I know she thinks I’d do anything to her, but I wouldn’t have her
arrested. How‘s that for a mother’s love? I can’t be all bad, right?

Less than a week later was
an even more disturbing entry:

I told Lou today that I
should have pressed charges on her. She told me that if I ever did anything
like that, she’d break the bottle next time and cut my throat with it. She’s
always saying what a terrible mother I was, but what kind of daughter says
something like that to her mom? Now that my daughter’s all grown up, she hates
me. My twin sister and I have always hated each other. I guess hate just runs
in the family.

Savannah closed the diary,
laid it on her nightstand, and turned out the lamp. She had enjoyed as much
family politics—her own and Eleanor’s—as she could stand for one day.

But as she drifted off to
sleep, she thought of little Gilly, her small face lit with joy as she played
with her new puppy. Savannah could also remember a moment there in the moonlit
gazebo when the child had been speaking about her mother leaving her alone for
long periods of time and about Grandma smelling like booze and talking bad. Savannah
recalled the traces of bitterness and anger on that tiny face. The cycle was
beginning all over again. Yes... it seemed that hate just ran in some families.

Savannah was awake another
hour, thinking about it. But she wasn’t wondering why.

Chapter

S
avannah silently cursed
Dirk, who sat across th
e table from her, an expectant
grin on his face. He had a lot of nerve, showing up before she’d even downed
her second cup of coffee and asking for a favor. A favor which he could have
easily done himself—if it hadn’t been for that stupid “male pride” thing.

Apparently, it wasn’t easy
for some men to ask another guy for help. And in Dirk’s case, why should he? He
had Savannah to do it for him.

As Dirk watched, tapping
his fingers on the tabletop, and Cordele poked around in the refrigerator,
looking for something “worth eating,” as she had delicately phrased it,
Savannah sat with her coffee cup in one hand and the phone in the other,
waiting for Ryan to pick up on the other end. He did.... on the third ring.

“It’s Savannah,” she said,
instantly cheering at the sound of his deep, virile voice. A shot of Ryan in
the morning was more stimulating than any caffeine.

“Dirk has a favor to ask
you,” she said, wrinkling her nose at Dirk.

“Oh, goody,” Ryan replied.
She could hear the semi-sarcastic tone. It was hard to miss. The fact had been
established long ago that Dirk, Ryan, and John would probably have nothing to
do with each other were it not for the common denominator of their friendship
to Savannah. “What can I do for Detective Coulter?” he said wryly.

“He wants you to put on
your sexiest swim briefs— the briefer the better—and go hang out on the beach.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Finally, Ryan said, “I’m afraid to
ask why.”

She grinned. “I understand.
But if you’ll slip those on and grab a beach towel and a book, we’d like to
meet you at Topanga Park in an hour. Do you mind?”

Again, silence. Then, “For
you, Savannah, anything.”

“I love you.”

“And obviously, I do you,
too. See you in an hour.” As Savannah was pushing the TALK button to end the
call, she glanced over at Cordele, who had suddenly emerged from the
refrigerator. “Ryan Stone.... in a skimpy swimsuit?” she said, tongue hanging
slightly out. “Can I go along?”

Savannah shook her head.
“No.”

She stomped her foot.
“Yes!”

“I said, ‘No.’ It’s
business, not pleasure.”

“Since when is seeing Ryan
Stone’s bod in a swimsuit not a pleasure?” Cordele wanted to know.

Dirk had had enough. He
pushed away from the table and stood. “You broads are disgusting, you know
that? And you talk about us guys ogling chicks!”

“Oh, shut up, Dirk,”
Savannah replied, burying her face in her cup. “After all, Ryan in a swimsuit
was your big idea.”

Dirk grunted and left the
room.

“See ya in an hour,” Savannah
called after him. She heard the front door slam.

“I wanna go!” Cordele
whined. “I mean it, Savannah! I really, really wanna go! And you'd better let
me.”

Savannah took a deep breath
and another drink of coffee.

“No.”

An hour later, Savannah,
Dirk, and Ryan rendezvoused at the Topanga State Park, a beach reserve that was
conveniently located only about a quarter of a mile from the Maxwell estate.
Ryan was wearing a navy polo shirt and white walking shorts, but he quickly
assured her that he had a pair of red Speedos underneath.

“I wasn’t going to drive
around town in them,” he told Dirk, whose perpetual frown had deepened upon
seeing his attire. “Not even for you.” He turned back to Savannah. “What’s this
all about, anyway?”

She pulled a pair of
binoculars off the Buick’s dash and beckoned him. “Follow me.”

They walked to a small
cliff that had wooden steps leading to the beach. She pointed down the stretch
of sand to a tiny cove and handed him the binoculars.

“Check out the blonde in the
pink bikini lying there on the towel,” she told him.

He looked through the
glasses and focused. “Yeah. So?”

Dirk gave her a quick look
and a smirk. Savannah’s nostrils flared, so he swallowed whatever he was going
to say.

"We need you to keep
her busy for as long as you can,” Savannah said.

“Yeah, at least half an
hour,” Dirk added. “I gotta search her place, and I don’t want her comin’ home
till We’re done.”

“Do you have a warrant?”
Ryan asked, still looking through the binoculars.

“Yeah, but I don’t wanna
give her a heads-up that we’re lookin’ at her just yet,” Dirk replied. “Not
till I see what I’ve got on her, if anything.”

Ryan handed the glasses
back to Savannah and started to peel off his polo shirt. A second later, the
shorts came off, and Savannah could no longer speak.

Glancing at his watch, Ryan
said, “Half an hour, starting now.”

Dirk looked at his. ‘Yeah.
Startin’ now.”

Ryan went back to his car,
tossed the clothes inside, and retrieved a San Carmelita Yacht Club towel.
Tossing it over his shoulder, he headed for the steps and the beach.

“You wanna stick your eyes
back in your head?” Dirk finally said, shaking Savannah’s arm.

She continued to stare at
what had to be the most incredibly perfect male body on the planet. The broad
shoulders, the toned muscles, the tiny waist and hips, the legs that—

“You comin’ or not?” Dirk
said as he left her and marched back to the car.

“Coming?” she whispered as
she continued to stare, transfixed, at the retreating figure on the beach. “No....
but I’m sure a-breathin’ hard.”

Louise’s cottage was no
neater or cleaner than Savannah remembered it. If anything, even more movie
magazines, tabloid papers, empty fast-food containers, and soda cans lay about,
littering every horizontal surface in sight. The place stank of garbage.

Savannah thought of little
Gilly, and her heart ached that a child, presumably born to wealth, was being
raised in such squalor. The only sign of joy in the small house was a
smattering of plastic dog toys scattered around the floor.

But they saw no sign of the
dog, Gilly, or Louise— who was at that moment, being entertained by the
charming Ryan Stone.

Tammy had met Savannah and
Dirk outside the mansion’s gates, and they had entered the cottage together.
For the first time since Eleanor’s demise, Savannah had some real hope that she
and her friends were within reach of a solution to her murder.

“Gloves,” Dirk said as he
slipped on a pair of his own and offered some to the ladies.

Savannah could recall a
day—that didn’t seem so long ago—when being a peace officer or a private
investigator could be done with one’s bare hands. But no more. If you weren’t
afraid of catching a deadly bug from somebody or safeguarding potential
evidence, you were warding off the possibility of being accused on the stand of
having done a sloppy crime-scene inspection, thereby jeopardizing the
prosecution’s case.

Whatever the precautions,
Savannah longed for the good ol’ days when her sweaty palms hadn’t been encased
in latex and the only gloves she owned were the yellow ones under the bathroom
sink that she used to clean her toilet.

“There’s the computer,”
Tammy piped up. “Want me to get started there?”

“That’s what we brought you
for,” Dirk grumbled. “Certainly wasn’t for your good looks.”

“No, the only one along for
his looks was Ryan,” Savannah said as she followed Tammy over to a corner desk
and an old, enormous and bulky desktop PC that sat on it. ‘Jeez, Tam... you
should get a load of Ryan in a swimsuit. He”—she cut an eye over to Dirk and
added—“never mind. I’ll tell ya later.”

Tammy sat down at the desk
and switched on the computer. Savannah hovered over her shoulder as Dirk walked
around, opening drawers, cupboards, and closets.

“Let’s see what we’ve got
here,” Tammy said as she browsed the desktop screen of the computer. “Windows
‘98... some computer games that are probably Gilly’s.... Internet access.... a
bunch of downloaded music.”

“Did she write those damned
letters on there or not?” Dirk snapped as he meandered over toward them, having
momentarily satisfied his curiosity about the rest of the apartment.

“Just give me a minute,
will you?” Tammy barked back. ‘Just how irritating can you be, Dirko? I—wait a
minute. Here we are. I’m into her word-processing program.” Savannah leaned
over her, staring at the screen. “What’s the default font?” she asked, barely
daring to breathe.

Tammy’s face widened with a
broad smile. “Arial... 14.”

“Yes!” Savannah started
pulling the desk drawers open. “Whatcha wanna bet I find that tan parchment
stationery here, too?”

“What’s a default font?”
Dirk asked.

Savannah smiled to herself,
knowing what it must have cost him to ask. Dirk didn’t relish looking
uninformed under any circumstances, but especially in front of Tammy, whom he
regarded as a bothersome kid sister.

“The default font, Arial
14,” Tammy explained without any note of haughtiness, “is just the style and
size of print that she has the computer set to type.”

“It’s not like a
typewriter?” Dirk asked. “It can type different ways?”

“Many, many ways and
sizes,” she told him. “It’s all adjustable by the settings, and she’s got hers
set to the same as the threatening letters were.”

“Can you tell if she typed
those exact letters on this?” Dirk asked. “I know some guys at the lab can go
into a computer and see what the user’s been doing on it.”

“That’s what I’m checking
right now.” Tammy continued to click and move around the screen with a level of
skill that easily impressed both Savannah and Dirk.

“There’s hardly anything in
her documents file, except some stuff that might have been school homework for
Gilly. Nothing here that’s like those letters,” she said.

“Shoot,” Savannah said as
she opened the bottom drawer of the desk and looked inside. “I was hoping—
well, you know what I was hoping.”

“Yeah, we all were,” Tammy
replied, continuing to type and click away. “But I didn’t really expect to find
the letters among her documents. If she’s smart, she would have deleted them.”

“Deleted?” Dirk sounded
crushed.

“Yeah, but...” Tammy
suddenly brightened. “Now
that’s
what I was hoping for!”

Savannah stopped her search
and stood straight. Dirk leaned over until his head was obscuring both of their
views of the monitor screen. “What?” he asked. “What? What?”

“She didn’t empty her
recycle bin.”

“Empty the garbage?”
Savannah asked. “What are you talking about?”

Tammy tapped a tiny symbol
on the computer screen that looked like a miniature garbage can with white
papers sticking out the top. “When you delete something in the computer, it
goes into the ‘trash.’ But it’s not really, truly gone until you also empty
what they call the ‘recycle bin.’ ”

“Can you see what she put
in there?” Dirk asked.

“I sure can. Hold on....”

Nobody breathed as Tammy
clicked on the little garbage pail and a list of documents popped up. They had
been labeled: “Mom 1, Mom 2, and Mom 3.”

One by one, Tammy opened
the letters on the screen, and they read the threats that they had practically
memorized from the letters that Eleanor had given Savannah.

“We’ve got her!” Dirk said.
“I’m going to cart this whole computer thing down to the lab, and have them
print this stuff out. Wait’ll the D.A. gets a load of this.” Savannah had
resumed her search for the paper, and it was in the bottom of the lower drawer
that she found it: a box of parchment stationery of assorted colors, including
tan. She pulled out the box and handed it to Dirk with a smile. “And let your
D.A. stick that in his pipe and smoke it, along with what they get from the
computer there.”

Tammy closed down the PC,
then stood. “When are you going to arrest her?” she asked Dirk.

He grinned... and it
occurred to Savannah that when he smiled, Dirk really was quite a good-looking
guy. Not gorgeous, like Ryan. But he had a certain street-worn appeal.

Unfortunately, he only smiled
like that when he was about to bust somebody.

“How’s about right now?” he
said. “You girls wanna come along for the fun?”

He didn’t have to ask
twice.